Tubefilter News

Big Frame (formerly The Cloud Media)—the group behind The Digitour and some of the most watched talent online—has joined the elite ranks of producers which YouTube selected for its first wave of premium Original Channels.

Big Frame’s new channel BAM features YouTube’s top special effects masters, including MysteryGuitarMan, Corridor Digital, and Mike Diva. “With an actual budget and a crew to work with I intend to show youtube the malformation of creativity, entertainment, hate, love and everything in between,” Mike Diva told Tubefilter.

“There are valuable audiences who subscribe to YouTube channels and tune in every week to see what great video content will come next,” Steve Raymond, Big Frame CEO, told Tubefilter. “Big Frame is dedicated to supporting this new breed of content producer by helping them grow their audiences and work with the many advertisers who want to reach them, The BAM channel gives our creators the opportunity to make more videos for their fans, with more resources to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible.”

Here’s the rundown:

SandBox – MysteryGuitarMan will issue a themed video challenge to both his handpicked team of collaborators and the YouTube community at-large, with mind-blowing results.
Robot Dog – Stunning videos that include fresh new beats, choreographed dance, green screen tricks and cool visual effects.
Synch – In the future, agents use a system that allows humans to transfer their consciousness and control a host body – even if the host body dies, the knowledge is still retained and ‘synced’ with the original agent. But when an agent’s natural body is taken hostage, he must convince his family and friends to help him, despite his new appearance.

Mondo Media, the force behind online animation sensation Happy Tree Friends, scored an original channel as a part of YouTube’s announcement on Friday.

The new channel, New Animators, will focus on Mondo Media’s core audience of teens and young adults. Mondo’s hugely successful animation shows have helped its YouTube channel amass 1 billion total upload views (996,630,260 currently, with an additional 4,298,217 in German and 168,858 in Spanish).

“We’ve already been able to amass a really big audience (billion views and counting) on YouTube around hit properties like Happy Tree Friends and Dick Figures,” John Evershed, Mondo Media CEO, told Tubefilter. “Being part of the new YouTube Original Channels program will help us to launch more new, higher quality shows on a regular, higher frequency basis—all key factors in success on YouTube. Couple this with the Google TV announcement and it’s pretty easy to see how this lays down the tracks for us to realize our vision of a global animation channel for teens and young adults.”

Courtney Holt is joining Maker Studios as the Culver City-based new media studio’s new Chief Operating Officer, the company informed us today. Holt in some ways represents the closest thing to parental guidance that YouTube creator-founded studio has seen yet, as it continues its rapid growth and prepares for production on its three new YouTube-funded content channels set for early next year.

Holt will serve in the newly created COO role, overseeing the growth and development of the Maker Studios brand, advertising models, strategy and its operations, the company said.

His last post as President of MySpace Music, a free streaming music joint venture with the major labels, ended in February, though Holt remained on as an advisor for News Corp. Before that Holt served as executive vice president of digital music for the MTV Networks Music & Logo Group.

Shane Dawson sure does love Halloween. Maybe it’s a worthy excuse to (cross)dress up and scream frequently. While trumping last year’s interactive Haunted Halloween House party is a tall order, but Shane channeled his inner teen brat Amy this year for a 22-minute short film, “Friends 4 Ever”—Scream fans should feel right at home with this one.

The video screened in Los Angeles this past Friday to around 500 or so eager fans shrieking at every twist. Already it has broken the one-million-view mark since hitting YouTube on Saturday.

“FRIENDS 4 EVER” : A Halloween Short Film (ShaneDawsonTV)

The last installment of Zach Galifianakis’ irreverent addition to the online video genre of faux celebrity talk shows debuted with special guest Will Ferrel over five months ago. It was the thirteenth episode of the Speed Stick-sponsored and Funny or Die-distributed original web series Between Two Ferns since Galifianakis kicked off the program in January 2008 with a confrontational conversation with Michael Cera.

That amounts to one installment of Between Two Ferns for every three or four months, which is a way less number of installments of Between Two Ferns than both its fans and Galifianakis would like to watch and make. In fact, the host would shoot more episodes if he could get potential celebrity guests to participate without asking “so many $#%^ing questions.”

In an interview with Christina Radish over at Collider, the stand-up comedian and actor with one of the best Saturday Night Live opening monologues of all time expressed his frustration over how difficult it is for household Hollywood names to have a seat in a structure normally reserved for parked cars and have fun in front of a couple cameras.

Here’s Galifianakis’ refreshingly candid response to the question “Will you be doing any more episodes of Between Two Ferns?”

San Francisco-based creative studio Seedwell snagged an original channel from YouTube, who announced its first slate of Original Channels yesterday.

You may remember Seedwell from Tubefilter’s San Francisco meetup about demystifying viral videos this summer. Seedwell’s new channel, American Hipster, will explore pop culture through the lens of hipsterism, that ironically popular movement built on not being popular.

“Having YouTube support Seedwell’s production of regular content allows us to focus on what we do best – creating videos that people love to watch and share,” Beau Lewis, Partner and Head of Business at Seedwell, told Tubefilter. “This is also a great opportunity for our business; we believe the upside of online video advertising has yet to be fully realized and YouTube will play a key role in its evolution. We’re excited to be a part of it.”

The channel is scheduled to launch in April 2012 and feature three weekly shows:

Max Movie Reviews, a Hollywood movie review show hosted by a funny, talking hipster baby (starring Maximus The Baby)
Les Hip, a weekly vlog-style roundup of pop trends and celebrity news hosted by two hilarious, ranting San Francisco hipsters (starring Robert Denning and Erika Shumate)
American Hipster, the flagship show for the channel (hosted by Paavo Steinkamp), a traveling documentary-style series that explores contemporary hipster culture first-hand in multiple cities across the country
“It’s really exciting to see YouTube work with a variety of content producers including people like us who have been dedicated to the YouTube platform since its inception,” said Peter Furia, Partner and Head of Creative and Marketing at Seedwell. “YouTube has always been the best site for social video and we’re looking forward to being a part of building even larger dedicated audiences around this latest influx of high quality video content. We, of course, encourage people who are interested in American Hipster to subscribe to the channel on YouTube, and follow its shows’ Facebook pages and Twitter accounts.”

Corporate-free daily online political news commentators The Young Turks are on fire.

The indie news show led by former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur broke 500 million view on YouTube. They have a deal with Revision 3. They’re even getting a daily TV show on CurrentTV.

Now YouTube has tapped The Young Turks for its Original Channels initiative announced yesterday. YouTube has committed $100 million dollars to elevate premium content on the platform. The Young Turks’ new channel, Town Square, is a new political news and commentary channel run without any corporate media influence or bias.

Cenk Uygur gave Tubefilter his perspective on this new project:

We’re really excited to be part of the 100 new channels YouTube has funded. We’re in great company. The Young Turks has been dominating the news commentary space on YouTube and online for a long time now. So, it made perfect sense for us to a bring forward a new channel focused solely on political and current events commentary. Politics is our bread and butter. No one does it bigger or better.

The new channel is Town Square and before the 2012 election it will have several different political shows on it. Our first show on Town Square will be The Point. The Point is perfect for the online viewing experience because it will have short videos sent in by news makers, celebrities and analysts. Then a panel of experts will discuss the point made by the newsmaker. It’s a show that will allow you to hear from many different perspectives and let you go as deep into a topic as you would like. It’s where people come to make their point in the town square.

Maker Studios made out big with YouTube’s big announcement last night revealing its first wave of original channels.

Maker Studios was one of the big winners with three original channels—the most channels awarded to any producer. Of the 96 original channels announced yesterday, most only received one; only six other producers were given three channels: Bedrocket Media, BermanBraun, Clevver Media, Demand Media, Electus, and IconicTV.

YouTube has committed over $100 million dollars for its latest content initiative, tapping A-list producers and top talent to create premium content. Yet unlike many of the new Hollywood-focused channels blessed by YouTube, what Maker founders Dan Zappin, Lisa Donovan, and Ben Donovan have created along with talent co-founders KassemG, Michael Gallagher, Shay Carl, and many others is something built from the ground up.

“YouTube itself has changed the world, some individual videos on YouTube and certain YouTube Partners have impacted the world, and now whole networks and mini-networks on YouTube can continue the trend,” Will Keenan, a Maker exec, told Tubefilter.” As major changes take place and TV goes ‘social’ at the same time that web-video goes ‘network’, soon we’ll be able to lean-back-everywhere and enjoy the ride.”

The three Maker channels:

The Maker Music Network, which will offer high quality music content through a community of artists, music lovers and additional talent.
The Moms’ View, which will provide all moms a place to go to find content they can relate to.
Tutele, which will offer bilingual cultural programming to supply the increasing demand for content by Latinos—the first ever global online bilingual original-programming network.