Tubefilter News

Academy voters had their hands full this year in pairing down some 2,000 web shows submitted from fans in over 100 different countries. Voters weren’t shy in acknowledging the international fare with nominated series coming from Hong Kong, United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, France, Canada and The United States. The official nominees for the 2nd Annual Streamy Awards were announced this morning in a live streamed internet broadcast led by CBSNews.com’s Shira Lazar and theStream.tv’s Jim Festante.

Click here for the full list of Streamy Award nominees.

Whole Lotta Drama

While comedy series seemed to run the table last year thanks to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and The Guild, this time voters lauded a handful of dramas with multiple nominations. The Bannen Way led with seven nominations including Best Drama, Best Writing, Best Directing and Best Actor for co-creator and lead Mark Gantt. Gritty indie drama Compulsions also is in the Best Drama hunt, picking up four nominations. British crime drama Girl Number 9 earned five nominations and murder mystery Valemont picked up six. Australian drama OzGirl and Angel of Death are also up for Best Drama.

Comedy Powerhouses Return

Experience was rewarded in Best Comedy nominations. The Guild, which bowed its third season in 2009, proved it still has the mojo amongst the Academy which bestowed seven nominations this time around. The addition of a rival guild, led by a very well cast Wil Wheaton even landed a Best Guest star nod for the show. Its “cousin” series, The Legend of Neil has some solid support of its own, which may or may not have something to do with Sandeep Parikh having a hand in both shows. Easy to Assemble rolled out its sophomore season and Wainy Days its third. Even web comedian-turned-movie-star Zach Galifianikis has two years of Between Two Ferns under his belt.

What’s New?

Comedy can be an acquired taste. And looking at the Best Comedy category, none of the nominated series were new on the block in 2009. So with the addition of Best New Web Series into the mix—or as some like to call it, the category-that-can’t-be-won-by-The-Guild—upstart comedies like Odd Jobs and Old Friends were able to pick up nominations. Personally, I like this category. And for the most part the Academy used it to take notice of what popped onto the scene last year. But following the drama trend this year, three dramas made it into this final five—The Bannen Way, Girl Number 9 and Craig Brewer’s debut season of indie music docu-series $5 Cover.

Co-Stars Square Off

Meanwhile on the acting front, the Season 2 rivalry between Easy to Assemble co-stars Justine Bateman and Illeana Douglas spilled over into the Best Female Actor in a Comedy category, with both actresses notching enough votes to face off against each other. Still, they face off against last year’s winner in this category, The Guild’s Felicia Day, who returns for the second straight year along with Web Therapy star Lisa Kudrow. Joanna Cassidy, from the indie comedy Sex Ed, rounds out the nominees with her performance as acerbic college sex professor.

For the male comedians, Zach Galifianakis picked up his first Streamy nomination after a solid year delivering his trademark awkward low-fi interviews with celebrities in Between Two Ferns. The Guild’s Sandeep Parikh scored his second Streamy nomination for this category, which ended up going to Neil Patrick Harris last year. Amir Blumenfeld also picked up a second Best Actor nomination for his half of popular comedy Jake and Amir. CTRL’s cubicle hero Tony Hale and Wainy Days eponymous creator-star David Wain make up the rest of this heated race.

Actors in the Best Female Drama hunt were all first-timers with all five coming from web series that debuted in 2009. Rachael Hip-Flores’ touching performance in indie drama Anyone But Me won over Academy voters as did Tatyana Ali’s freshman season of Buppies. Sophie Tilson dazzled as Sadie in OzGirl much like Zoe Bell in Angel of Death and Crystal Chappell in web soap Venice.

Picking up a not so shabby four nominations was Auto-Tune the News, which is up for Best News or Politics Web Series, Best Editing, Best Experimental and Best Original Music in a Web Series for The Gregory Brothers—Evan, Andrew, Sarah and Michael Gregory. Canadian steampunk drama Riese and Anyone But Me joined in the four-nominations club.

Web 2.0 startups are now well versed in the the so-called ‘freemium’ model of doing business. Give a basic level of your service away for free and then charge users for premium services. Everything from project management tools (Basecamp), collaborative learning (Grockit), online radio (Pandora) and business networking (LinkedIn) all have made this the core models of their businesses.

As we first noticed last year, the freemium model is now making its way into the online video business. Today comes news of two different sides of the web video platform spectrum—premium content site Hulu and live streaming site Ustream—hinting that they too are heading towards this model. The slower adoption of freemium in online video is in many ways linked to a decades old reliance on ad supported entertainment business, particularly in television. But recent moves are sending signals the industry may be on the heels of a turning point on the idea of paid content.

The LA Times today has outlines Hulu’s plans to allow users to watch the five most recent episodes of TV shows free, but then require a subscription of $4.99 a month to watch older episodes. Roll out of this could be as soon as six months from now, according to the newspaper’s sources. And Ustream just launched its Pay-Per-View service with comedian Dane Cook being the first guinea pig to try it out, charging $5 to watch his “ISolated INcident” stand-up routine on February 6.

Independent web series like Jimmy Pardo’s Never Not Funny and Tiki Bar TV have both rolled out their own freemium offerings in the past year. Loyal viewers, of which both shows have a decent amount, pay for ‘memberships’ that give them higher-quality versions of the videos, along with bonus content and early access to new episodes. The results have been mixed, and for a long-running web series like Tiki Bar TV, it’s still just one of the multiple revenue streams it relies on.

“The Tiki Bar Membership model worked relatively well,” producer Tosca Musk told us. “Unfortunately, not well enough to sustain the show, but it certainly did help. And the response from fans was enthusiastic. At the end of the day, Tiki Bar TV events and merchandise have brought in more revenue than memberships. It still seems that paying to watch a show you love, after watching it for free for years, is not as appealing as supporting through others means.”

Tiki Bar TV is back from hiatus and out with a new episode today (above) featuring The Guild’s Sandeep Parikh (aka Zaboo) as “The Commodore.” And just in time for the holidays (but not in time for out Holiday Gift Guide) the consummate merchandisers are out with a new line of t-shirts, many of which look like “Tiki Bart V.” [Tiki Bar TV]

Compulsions concluded its eight episode first season today with the release of Episode 8 “Promise Kept” today on Dailymotion. The dark thriller cruised past 118,000 views so far during its exclusive run on the video site, averaging around 14k per episode. Creator Bernie Su and the cast and crew were live last night on A Fangirl’s Guide with host Cricket Lee. [Compulsions]

SyFy Network may have ripped off the web series ClipCritics from creator Chad Sahley with its new series Outer Space Astronauts. The whole thing reminds Nalts, and us, of The Fine Brothers and the case of the eyebrow-raising coincidence that was LOST Untangled. [Will Video For Food]

London-based CAKE Entertainment has entered into a co-production deal for 52-episode short-form 3-D interactive adventure web series, If I Was…., created by young animator Junior Jesman, who was discovered by CAKE on Dailymotion. [WorldScreen.com]

The 2nd Annual Streamy Awards are April 11, 2010. That’s 180 days until the winners are announced live on stage, and we thought it’s never too early to start handicapping the field. So it’s nice to see that The Mercury Men posted a behind the scenes look at the pulp sci-fi web series’ production design.

Mercury Men creator Christopher Preksta released the documentary video (above) as part of his “Mercury Mondays” weekly production journals. “Design is really important to me,” said Preksta in the video, “It’s another tool that I as a filmmaker have to support my story and set the tone, the world and bring a unique vision to the story.”

In the video we learn that Mercury Men design pulls from three separate themes—the 30’s/40’s sci-fi pulp (Buck Rodgers, Flash Gordon), 1950’s sci-fi movie’s noir, and the early 60’s US Space program. Costumer Ricky Lyle, who also worked on Preksta’s Streamy-nominated Captain Blasto, gets credit from Preksta for nailing that uber-researched style that he was looking for.

There’s something to be said about creating presentation materials, or in this case a video, that profiles elements of the production. Last year’s Streamy winner for Art Direction, Kim Bailey for Tiki Bar TV, put together an impressive “for your consideration” page on his site that detailed the before-during-after of his impressive SS Tiki set. No doubt that Academy voters had it fresh on their minds when casting votes last winter.

When it comes to getting exposure for your web series, you don’t need a six-figure distribution deal (although that certainly wouldn’t hurt)… what you need is a strong hook. And for Jeremy Redleaf, creator of Odd Job Nation, that hook was literally odd jobs. The concept of the series was loosely based on a friend of his who odd jobbed his way to a 5-bedroom suburban home doing everything from walking neighborhood dogs to renting out his driveway. In the pilot of Odd Jobs, we see Jeremy’s character, Nate, get fired from his high-paying job with a big investment firm, and his roommate extolling the moneymaking wonders of Craiglist’s Odd Jobs as a viable source of income. Though somewhat skeptical of making a living from random side gigs, to support his high maintenance fiancée, Nate begrudgingly agrees to try his hand at odd jobbing. And so was born a series that only 2 episodes in has already garnered some high profile press from the likes of Newsweek, CNN, CNBC and the Washington Times. (And of course Tubefilter.)

But… the coverage wasn’t about the show.

It was about the online community of odd job seekers that Jeremy built around the site, aggregating the Craigslist ‘Odd Jobs’ listings from every major city across the country, and allowing users to post – and apply to – odd jobs of their own. In fact, with only 2 episodes available, the lure of the site to date has been the job board, not the series. But with the volume of regular traffic the site’s been getting, it’s expanded the exposure for the show to a more mainstream audience than most web series typically attract, giving Jeremy that coveted hook to reel viewers in. And reeling them in, he is.

The team behind long running comedy web series Tiki Bar TV has always been one to push the boundaries of web production, and now it seems they are keeping up that reputation as they announce a paid subscription model and an interactive video game due out later this year.

The new “Membership” plan, allows fans a slew of privileges including downloads of full HD (720p) episodes in Dolby 5.1 Surround sound, a 15% discount on all official Tiki merchandise and access to members-only events like a recent Happy Hour at Tiki Bar HQ. Priced at $49 annually, enrollment appears to be exceeding expectations. Tiki Bar producer Tosca Musk said so far she has “about two days worth of membership cards to print up.”

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! More Streamy Awards news to report—today the ten Audience Choice Award finalists have been announced and voting begins to see which 2008 web series has the most fan love out there. The following ten web series were the most overall submitted in any category during the open submission period which ended January 23rd. Video blogger extraordinaire iJustine had a little fun taking the honors of kicking off the voting frenzy (above).

What do you need to do? First, head over to vote.streamys.org and watch episodes from all of the finalists in the nifty interactive player from Episodic. Then VOTE daily for your favorite series from now until March 28th. Have an iPhone? You can even watch the finalists directly on your phone and vote on the go. Grab your phone and head to i.episodic.com/streamys How cool is that?

Um. Wow. That was one hell of a way to wrap up the Meetup—with 300 teenagers rushing the stage as “I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T” by Webbie featuring Lil’ Boosie and Lil’ Phat blasted the space. As Sean Percival of LA-based tech gossip rag lalawag put it, what resulted was “an interesting mashup of Twittering geeks moshing with LA hip-hop-artti.” But perhaps we’d better start from the beginning. With an RSVP-list topping out at over 600, Cinespace was bursting at the seams with another massive turnout for the Hollywood Web Television Meetup.

This month featured seasoned podcasters Tosca Musk and Jeff MacPherson of veteran series Tiki Bar TV who talked about distribution, merchandising, having fun, and receiving alarming phone calls from Steve Job’s office.