Tubefilter News

ComScore rated top 5 video network Digital Broadcasting Group (DBG) was one of the nearly 100 Original YouTube Channels announced in the first slate of YouTube’s $100 million premium content initiative.

Bradley Werner, VP of Production & Series Development at DBG, describes the new channel, Spaces, as “a younger, metropolitan-but-street-smart Home & Design channel that’s more than just reveals and advice for people who want to flip turn-of-the-century Colonial-style homes—we want to bring a new personality to this type of content that is both fun and sophisticated.”

Spaces is scheduled to go live in April 2012, and will feature the inspiration of top designers, celebs, and professionals. The series will provide for a hands-off audience hands-on advice about how make welcome aesthetic changes to the places they live.

“With the active YouTube community, we’re going to be able to provide a platform for continuous project feedback and regular audience show and tells,” Werner told Tubefilter. “We’re also psyched by how many celebrities we’ve spoken with who have a genuine interest in interior design and want to take us along for the ride while they remodel some of their own spaces.”

DBG’s original content initiatives include ControlTV, Kiefer Sutherland and John Hurt’s The Confession, and Coke’s Style Series.

The cancellation of the 2011-2012 season of National Basketball Association seems imminent. Negotiations broke down earlier this month between the NBA Players Union and NBA owners despite the fact there will be billions of dollars of losses in potential salaries and revenue (and because of the fact no one involved in the deliberations apparently is, or was a fan of Major League Baseball).

This all means Kobe Bryant’s already lost seven-figures’ worth of wages, NBA TV is filling its programming slate with old sports flicks and classic games, and the players all have a lot of free time on their hands.

And if the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike taught us anything, it’s that members of a union with a lot of free time on their hands who are unable to work their regular jobs because of some sort of involuntary work stoppage love to create videos for the internet.

To be clear, NBA lockout videos are nothing new. Seth Meyers was conceiving of remedial tasks for out of work NBA stars to perform since his hosting gig at the ESPYs in July and Funny or Die has been shooting installments of its Lockout League – the conversation Funny or Die’s know-nothing NBA correspondent has with the Houston Rockets’ Kyle Lowry about the privatization of the space program is genius – periodically for the past few months. But those were conceived to make light of the league’s situation and were produced by third party comedic entities. The Nick and JaVale Show is different.

The slice of life video blog features charmingly cocksure Washington Wizard teammates Nick Young and JaVale McGee doing whatever it is they do. Sometimes that’s basketball. Other times its Benihana or community service. And at least once its eating a spoonful of cinnamon.

The other piece of entertainment news to break this weekend for fans of cult-classic comedies was something everyone’s favorite Whedonite told Matt McDaniel in an interview with Yahoo! Movies. At the tail end of a conversation that centered around Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, and Joss Whedon’s highly anticipated, upcoming May 2012 release of The Avengers, the film’s director told McDaniel where he’s at with another highly anticipated production featuring what will hopefully be one helluva ensemble cast.
Whedon explained how a sequel for his 2008 online original Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is still in the works, he just needs a few more hours in the day to actually get started on production. Here’s Whedon’s exact response to McDaneil’s question about where he’s at with the project:

We have been working on that for a while. It’s been hard, because we all have jobs, and some of them are extremely taxing. But we have had a vision of the thing for a while, we have been working on it, we have a bunch of songs and a few scenes. We need a little free time and right now that’s plenty hard to come by.

If you’re a fan who can’t wait to see the “homines non boni seriose” who round out the Evil League of Evil, this is kinda promising news, right? A “bunch of songs and a few scenes” is a good start! But, if you’re fan who can’t wait to see the “homines non boni seriose” who round out the Evil League of Evil this is kinda disappointing news, too.

Whedon and company have been teasing a Dr. Horrible sequel since way back in July 2008 (which, at one point, it was rumored was going to be the first and premiere productions from a Whedon owned and operated new media studio). It’s nice to know Dr. Horrible is still on his mind, but it’s taking way longer to come to fruition than any Neil Patrick Harris fan or member of Whedonesque would like.

The biggest news in entertainment over the weekend (aside from Taylor Swift taking home the Artist of the Year Award at the American Music Awards and not thanking Kanye West in her acceptance speech) was that an online video platform known for streaming high quality entertainment properties enticed a few household Hollywood names by way of big checks to produce original programming exclusive to said online video platform. And no, I’m not talking about YouTube. That was so last month.

Andrew Wallenstein at Variety broke the news Netflix struck a deal with 20th Century Fox Television and Imagine Television to launch brand new episodes of Arrested Development by early 2013, a full seven years after the Emmy Award-winning program ended its original broadcast television run.

The show’s creator, Mitch Hurwitz, has been teasing fans for the past several months with word of a 10-episode mini season of Arrested Development that will precede a major motion picture based on the Bluths. That major motion picture and the number of episodes that will run on Netflix hasn’t been confirmed, but Hurwitz does promise he’ll be able to wrangle the original cast for all the installments of the series in the foreseeable future.

The news of Netflix launching new eps of Arrested Development follows the announcement earlier this year of the company’s distribution deal for the upcoming David Fincher-produced and Kevin Spacey-starring original series House of Cards. Netflix reportedly ponied up somewhere in the ballpark of $100 million for 26 episodes, the first of which is set to debut in late 2012. The streaming video service is also said to be in talks with the producers of Reno 911! to bring back new episodes of the series Comedy Central cancelled over two years ago.

Rain, even in Los Angeles, can’t stop a party like this one. There is something about top musicians in the world descending on one spot—and then performing—that make this special. Nothing against the actors, writers and directors of the world, but they aren’t exactly performing at most award shows. At the AMA’s tonight, it’s the best in the music game, and we get to see them work.

Sure, ABC has the main show (starting at 5pm PT tonight), but on this site we’re locked in on the internet broadcast. Because, in the future of television, it’s as Wayne Gretzky would say, where the puck is going to be. YouTube is broadcasting American Music Awards Red Carpet Pre-show live starting at 2pm PT.

What The Buck’s Michael Buckley is one of the official pre-show hosts, and there’s fashion coverage from YouTube’s Elle and Blair Fowler, live performances by DeStorm, Christina Grimmie and more. Basically, there’s reason to tune in even if Bieber wasn’t enough of a hook.

Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock’s Failure Club launched today on the recently revamped Yahoo! Screen.

The show is a part of Yahoo!’s latest slate of original programming featuring Spurlock and other stars including Judy Greer, Cameron Mathison, and Niecy Nash.

Seven people will meet every week over a year to help each other achieve the things they’ve only dreamed of: the stay-at-home mom who wants to start her own business, the market researcher who wants to become a stand-up comic, the 55 year old mother of a teenage daughter, who literally wants to get back on the horse and become an Equestrian, and others.

“This show is my own Failure Club,” said Spurlock. “I tried to get this concept on network television for seven years, but they were all scared to death of a ‘year-long’ format. Yahoo! wants to try things traditional outlets shy away from.”

Each member of the Failure Club will try and some will fail, but the journey will change them forever. People all over the world will be able to follow these courageous people and their quest to achieve their dreams,” Spurlock added. “And, hopefully along the way, they’ll be inspired to chase some dreams of their own.”

Andrew McMurry’s installment of his gamer-driven and After Effects-laden Real Life original web series that deals with fending off Minecraft zombies in the non-virtual world got me thinking about two things. First, what exactly is Minecraft? And second, what exactly is the deal with all these Minecraft videos?

Let’s tackle these in order. At it’s core, Minecraft is a video game that allows you to make anything you want to out of 8-bit blocks. In the two-and-a-half years since the game’s inception, players have taken that open premise to some very impressive (and obsessive) extremes, putting in literal days’ worth of game time into constructing renditions of familiar structures and fantasy landscapes.

(At least that’s how the game’s ‘Creative Mode’ works. There’s a ‘Survival Mode,’ too, where zombies come out at night to destroy your buildings, so you have to build shelters and blow the zombies up with dynamite to to protect your work.)

Those gamers that put so much time into crafting their retrographic architecture naturally want to show off all their hard work. Couple that tendency with the over 16 million current registered Minecrafters, and that explains where all the Minecraft videos come from. Alex Leavitt, of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, estimated back in November 2010 there were at least 400,000 Minecraft videos on YouTube alone. Since then, that number’s most likely increased by an order of magnitude or two.

The news of a TV series based on one of YouTube’s most popular series, The Annoying Orange, has been out there for over a year. But today came word just where that show is going to live, as Cartoon Network picked up creator Dane Boedigheimer’s six-episode longer form animated version.

Management company and production house The Collective partnered with Boedigheimer to produce six episodes of The Annoying Orange animated TV comedy series. The episodes come complete with A-list cartoon talent, including Tom Sheppard (Pinky and the Brain) handling writing responsibilities, Conrad Vernon (co-director of Monsters and Aliens, Shrek 2) executive producing, and Malcom McDowell lending his voice to one of the characters.

Release date is not yet set, though sometime in the first half of next year is what we are hearing. The online version will continue on their YouTube channel, with its 2.2 million subscribers still a very fertile platform for the franchise.