Tubefilter News

If you watched Epic Meal Time’s Thanksgiving video from this year (aka ‘The Turbaconepicentipede’) you may have noticed the Canadian crew known for their carnivore-friendly culinary concoctions used a few new ingredients on their quail, in a Cornish hen, in a chicken, in a duck, in a turkey, in a pig beyond their standard grotesquely excessive amounts of bacon, Jack Daniels, and meat.

Those new ingredients were the Epic Meal Time Official Bacon Flavored Salt and the Epic Meal Time Official Bacon Flavored Spread, which are actual products created in collaboration with the baconphiles at J&D’s Foods that you yourself can own for $5.99 and $4.49 a bottle.

“The partnership between J&D’s and Epic Meal Time is a match made in bacon heaven,” Brad Murphy, Cheif Revenue Officer of Revision3 (a new media network that signed Epic Meal Time earlier this year) told me over the phone. He’s right. With the amount of bacon Epic Meal Time’s Harley Morenstein and company cook, it’s fitting they’d team up to make their own line of foodstuffs with a company with the tagline “Everything should taste like bacon.”

“The product list for J&D’s Foods, might as well be a wish list for an Epic Meal Time viewer,” Murphy said. “We did a small campaign with them a couple years ago and it made sense to reach out again about a bigger opportunity with Epic Meal Time.”

So far, the response has been positive. Murphy tells me in the first few weeks of sales they’ve already moved thousands of product. The top seller so far is the Bacon Flavored Spread. It’s surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) beating out the Bacon Flavored Personal Lubricant, which is another pork-inspired item J&D is selling under the banner of Epic Meal Time. And it’s also vegan safe(?!?).

Twitter accounts don’t necessarily make for the best television shows. Justin Halpern and executives at CBS will be the first people to tell you that.

Halpern’s Twitter account Shit My Dad Says was picked up as inspiration for the CBS sitcom with the eponymous family-friendly-title of $h*! My Dad Says back in November 2009. By May 2011, after one 18-episode season, CBS cancelled the program. This happened despite star appeal (William Shatner played the role of “Dr. Edison Milford Goodson III” aka “Dad”) and a rabid online fan base (Halpern’s Twitter account has a couple million followers).

Twitter accounts may, however, make for pretty great web series. If the initial reception of Shit Girls Say is any indication, Halpern should’ve kept Shit My Dad Says online.

Created and written by Toronto-based filmmaker Graydon Sheppard and his partner Kyle Humphrey, and cameod by Juliette Lewis, the first installment of the original web series Shit Girls Say debuted on Monday, December 12. It stars Sheppard in drag and in banal locations reciting terribly ordinary things girls say in a perfect Kids-in-the-Hall-in-women’s-clothes impression.

The Digitour, a multi-week, multi-city music tour featuring some of the biggest self-made YouTube stars, is coming back in Spring 2012.

On last year’s Digitour, YouTube megastars including Dave Days, The Gregory Brothers, David Choi, DeStorm, MysteryGuitarMan, and Ricky Ficarelli, went on a 6-week 27-city national tour, kicking off at Google headquarters and culminating at the Tubefilter Hollywood Meetup The Digitour Debriefed. Artists on the Digitour represented over 6 million subscribers and one billion combined views on YouTube.

This year’s lineup includes musicians and personalities with a combined 10 million subscribers and two billion views. Launching in Los Angeles on March 1, 2012, the Digitour will feature headliners Dave Days, DeStorm, Ricky Ficarelli, Alex Goot, Asher Monroe, Nice Peter, and The Key of Awesome as they hit New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Houston, among other cities.

“I am so excited for the DigiTour this year and for the opportunity to get out there again, meet the fans, and perform with so many awesome and talented people,” Digitour performer Ricky Ficarelli told Tubefilter. “Digitour 2012 is gonna rock!”

“I am so excited to be doing the Digitour again this year,” Sarah Evershed Penna, one of the Digitour founders and producers, told Tubefilter. “It really shows that online video and social media is continuing to grow. We are thrilled to be offering audiences a chance to see their favorite YouTube musicians on the road again.”

Meredith Valiando, who also founded and produces the Digitour, told Tubefilter, “I am so excited to be in production on the 2nd Digitour! We changed a lot of skeptical minds who thought online fans would not buy tickets. It is an absolute honor to work with these stars and give them a vehicle, a forty five foot tour bus to be exact, to take their videos on the road and to produce the live version of videos that have received over 2 billion combined views.”

Tickets go on sale starting December 19, 2011.

Yahoo! isn’t the only online video destination building a studio in New York City. The home of original web series hits such as Time Magazine’s favorite You Suck at Photoshop, David Wain’s Wainy Days, A.D. Miles’ Horrible People, Josh Gad’s Gigi, and Mary Lynn Rajskub’s Dicki is constructing digs in which it will film a shiny new slate of online programming.

Once complete, the My Damn Channel Studio at the Film Center Building in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen will be home to the upcoming My Damn Channel production of My Damn Channel: Live. The program is one of YouTube’s chosen original channels and will consist of daily 10-minute interactive broadcasts in addition to one full 30-minute installment per week.

If that shooting schedule sounds ambitious, that’s because it is. A check from YouTube helps to cover the production costs, but you still need someone with a helluva internet production pedigree to ensure the creation of a quality live entertainment product, which people will choose to tune into every single day. That someone is Melissa Schneider.

Schneider joined the rapidly expanding My Damn Channel team earlier this month as Director of Production and the Producer of My Damn Channel: Live. Previously, Schneider was the Director of Production at Digital Broadcasting Group (a new media studio and online video distributor that also received one of those YouTube channels), but in the know online video enthusiasts will know her as one of the producers on Michael Eisner and Dinosaur Diorama’s The All-For-Nots and the Nickelodeon web series that never was.

“I’m thrilled to be part of the My Damn Channel team at this time of growth and development,” Schenider said.

New media studio DECA launched its YouTube original network of mom-centric programming called KinCommunity earlier this week. Some of the top female parents in female parent-oriented internet entertainment are sure to make appearances (DECA’s worked with names like Dooce, Soleil Moon Frye, and Daphne Brogdon on other projects), but two notable ladies with relatively new children who you won’t see on Kin are 1) Kourtney Kardashian (her mommy show is on on E! Online) and 2) Nadya Suleman aka Octomom (because her show is headed to Ustream).

TMZ reports the mother of 14(!!!) signed a six-figure deal with an unnamed production company to star in her own weekly original web series, streamed live from the comfortable confines of her own 15-person house. The program will air every Sunday and Suleman is slated to discuss topics like “parenting, fitness, diet, nutrition, shopping on a budget and all those crazy rumors.” The online original is set to launch before the end of the year.

The last time we’ve seen Suleman on any screen for any significant amount of time was back in August of 2009. That’s when the two-hour documentary Octomom: The Incredible Unseen Footage aired on Fox. Suleman also told Oprah in 2010 she will never do a reality television show.

Today popular animated series form Mondo Media Happy Tree Friends returns with original Christmas episode “Clause For Concern.”

“Clause For Concern” marks Happy Tree Friends’ 5th official Christmas-themed episode. The episode features the adorable father-son duo Pop and Cub, who set out to get into the holiday spirit with the best of intentions, until something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

“We wanted to surprise our fans with this new Christmas-themed episode,” Mondo Media CEO John Evershed told Tubefilter. “They have been asking about it and we are happy to spread some Happy Tree Friends holiday cheer.”

The series, created by Kenn Navarro and Rhode Montijo, generates over 22 million views per month on Mondo Media’s YouTube channel, Mondo Mini Shows, a top 20 YouTube channel that recently passed the 1 billion-view mark.

Mondo Media was one of the nearly 100 YouTube Original Channels announced at the end of October as a part of a $100 million premium content initiative. The new channel, New Animators, will focus on Mondo Media’s core audience of teens and young adults.

“In the coming months as we start taking full advantage of the YouTube redesign, and our new channel offerings,” Evershed told Tubefilter, “Happy Tree Friends fans will have more to look forward to.”

Jordan Mathewson, a.k.a. Kootra, one of Machinima Network’s Respawn Directors, just earned his crown as the latest King of the Web.

You may remember King of the Web from our last Tubefilter Meetup: Do Cheaters Never Prosper? Gaming the System In Online Video—they were our sponsor. King of the Web holds regular online competitions for fans to vote for who and what is awesome on the web.

Kootra, the latest King of the Web, is part of the Creature Hub, and is a Machinima Director as well as a Creature gamer who commentates over video games. Kootra started making machinima with Call of Duty 4 in 2008. He now specializes in live gameplay commentaries on YouTube. Some of his notable work includes the music video for The Crystal Method’s Play for Real, the Minecraft machinima Craft Spice, as well as being the cinematic designer for the Gears of War 3 unofficial trailer What Have I Become.

“It was a wild ride running for King of the Web. I entered late, but myself and the Creatures drove hard,” Kootra told Tubefilter. “All of our fans collectively came together and voted like none of us expected, it was amazing. Can’t wait till Battle Royale!”

Kootra is currently working with fellow Creatures Uberhaxornova, Gassy Mexican, Danz Newz, SSohpkc, Ze Royal Viking, and Sly Fox to launch a new business. “It will be a powerhouse for production of Live action content, as well as much of the same stuff we already do now,” Kootra told Tubefilter.

Today Clevver Media launched its new fashion-oriented CleverStyle channel, its second YouTube Original Channel, which follows ClevverTeve’s launch last month.

ClevverStyle taps into the billion dollar fashion industry, targeting a female audience looking for beauty and style news. Clevver is developing a slate of programs for the new channel including celebrity style interviews, how-to shows with professional makeup artists and fashion stylists, and event coverage.

“Through ClevverStyle, we are able to put our own unique spin on YouTube’s emerging fashion and beauty content category, Michael Palmer, Clevver Media’s Co-Founder, told Tubefilter. “This is such a vast industry and people are hungry for high-quality and relevant content, which is why we have been working hard to create a slate of fun and fashion-filled shows to launch this month and throughout the New Year. Our company has had so much success targeting niche audiences that we are very excited to take on fashion and beauty to expand our content offering, and therefore our audience.”

ClevverStyle will initially launch a slate of three new shows, which includes:

Daily Style – A daily news show highlighting up-to-the-minute style happenings
Nikki’s Closet – YouTuber and fashion and beauty guru Nikki Phillippi shows viewers how to get celebrity looks for less
RED – A daily show that examines celebrity red carpet looks
Last month Clevver launched ClevverTeVe, its all-Spanish channel designed to tap into the rapidly growing Latino market. The new channel includes three original series Teve Hollywood, Radar Latino, and Teve Moda.

Clevver scored three YouTube Original Channels—the most number of channels awarded to any single producer—as part of YouTube’s $100 million premium content initiative. This winter, Clevver will launch its third new channel ClevverNews, a daily, up-to-the-minute entertainment news channel.