Yesterday, YouTube’s CitizenTube channel released its highly anticipated interview with former President Bill Clinton, on the eve of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).

For the past five years, CGI has brought together current and former heads of state, Nobel Peace Prize winners, leading global CEOs, major philanthropists and foundation heads, directors of non-governmental organizations, and prominent members of the media in order to, according to the organization’s website, “help our world move beyond the current state of globalization to a more integrated global community of shared benefits, responsibilities, and values.”

At the New York meeting, which will be broadcast live on Livestream, these leaders will make public “Commitments to Action” supporting ideas and organizations who are tackling some of the world’s biggest problems. This year’s meeting will focus on empowering women and girls, market-based solutions to problems, access to modern technology, and harnessing human potential.

Similar to the Katy Perry and President Obama interviews, the Clinton interview makes use of the conversation and polling tool Google Moderator, which allows channels to poll their audiences in a way that’s more structured than sifting through a heap of text comments or video responses.

The Clinton interview, hosted by YouTube’s Steve Grove, features video questions which have been submitted and voted upon for a week or so prior to the interview. A resident in Haiti, a representative from the International Center for Research on Women, friends of Josh Fattal (one of the three American hikers who have been imprisoned in Iran for over a year), and others asked questions ranging from specific challenges outlined in the CGI agenda to questions about current events (such as the President’s opinion on the proposed Mosque at Ground Zero).

Here is the live webcast of the CGI Annual Meeting:

Filed under: Articles, Conferences and Events, Featured, News, News-Current Events, YouTube by Drew Baldwin
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Jessie Spano is so excited. She’s also so scared.

The most histrionic scene in all five seasons of Saved by the Bell is etched in the minds of every child of the early ’90s. While Joey Lawrence’s “Woah” and Pauley Shore’s “Wheez the Juice” fell by the wayside, Spano’s exclamations after overindulging on caffeine pills stood the test of time.

So, if you’re someone like Dan Levy and creating a web series that’s an amalgamation of your favorite early ’90s sitcoms, this is a scene you want to spoof. And wouldn’t ya know, Levy channels one helluva Elizabeth Berkley.

In the first installment of Atom‘s latest web series, Dan Levy’s Laugh Track Mash-Ups, Levy plays your stereotypical, naive high school student from which all after school specials are made. Dripping with impressionability, Dan dives headfirst into illegal substance abuse with the helping hand of resident bad boy, Snake. His downward spiral is frowned upon by his whitewashed social circle, but they’re all present at his hospital bed side when he wakes up from the drug-induced hysteria, apologizes, and pledges to be a better person.

It’s an installment of your favorite childhood sitcom, condensed into a seven-minute minisode, with familiar didactic overtones and references to TV shows like Hangin with Mr. Cooper, Saved by the Bell, Clarissa Explains it All, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Family Matters, Dinosaurs, Alf, Blossom, Home Improvement, and many, many more. It’s also very good, but only if you’re not expecting a clever send-up or tongue-in-check critique.

In Laugh Track Mash-Ups, Levy prefers emulation over derision. Everything becomes a lot more comical when you think of the series as an ode to or reenactment of those classic sitcoms, instead of just a way to make fun of them. Over e-mail, Levy and Laugh Track director and editor, Payman Benz, told me how the series came to be:

Tubefilter: How’d the show end up on Atom?

Dan Levy: Me and Todd Strauss Schulson pitched it to Atom a few months ago. We didn’t have all the ideas, we just really wanted me to be a butler to an all black family. Then he booked his first feature, Harold and Kumar 3, and said Payman would do it and do it well. He was so wrong!!!!!

Tubefilter: What kind of budget were you working with?

Payman Benz: We didn’t have much, I can say that. Like any other web series, we called in many, many favors. They seem simple but there’s a lot that went into them. First off, we shot them all at a studio in the valley where A LOT of porn is shot. That’s why the sets are so weird/perfect. But renting a porn studio for 3 days isn’t cheap. We also needed 90s wardrobe, and our costume designer Eva Fredrickson had a field day putting everything together. She rocked it.

All the technical requirements, plus the 5 million actors we had working with us made this project bigger than any of us expected going into it. But we all loved it and loved the ’90s, so we had to make it work.

Tubefilter: Did you do anything else to get that early ’90s feel?

Payman Benz: We shot these with 3 cameras, in standard-definition DV, 30 frames per second. I wanted them to be as ugly as shows in the 90s were. If we shot these in HD, they would not have been as funny.

Tubefilter: You got anything else for me?

Payman Benz: The ’80s aren’t funny anymore. The ’90s are back. Whoomp, there it is.

Check out weekly installments of Dan Levy’s Laugh Track Mash-Ups on Atom. And keep your eye out for a slew of appearances by talented actors, including James Adomian, Danny Pintauro (Jonathan on Who’s the Boss?), Jareb Dauplaise (Hard Times of RJ Berger), Tiny Lister, Kate Micucci, Kato Kaelin, Casper Van Diem, Hal Rudnick, Taryn Southern, Greg Benson, and Eric Andre.

If you find yourself wanting to watch more of Dan Levy’s work, you can catch his other web series, My Long Distance Relationship on Crackle.

Filed under: Comedy, News, Reviews, Web Series by Joshua Cohen
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‘In the Bedroom,’ the 433rd episode of lonelygirl15, just broke the 50 million view mark on YouTube. The video is also currently number 13 on the all-time most viewed list for the Entertainment category and the 81st most viewed video of all time on YouTube.

Jonas (Jackson Davis) posted the video on March 7th, 2008, where it quickly racked up the views and continues to do so, averaging approximately 80,000 new views a day some two years after the conclusion of the series.

Granted much of those views can be attributed to the provocative title and enticing thumbnail (which the LG15 producers inserted as a flash frame into the exact center of the video – at the 1:26 mark – so YouTube would be sure to grab it). The image features a suggestive shot of Jennie (Melanie Merkosky) in bed. Also, the video contains one of the series’ more memorable surprises as well as an important plot point.

In a time when most web series are lucky to gain 5,000 views, the fact that a single episode of a series has reached the upper echelons of popularity on YouTube should inspire fellow web series producers. If nothing else, it clearly demonstrates the importance of a good image to entice clicks. After all, breasts evolved for thumbnails.

Filed under: EQAL, Featured, lonelygirl15, News, YouTube by Mathieas McNaughton
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The number one late summer jam amongst the cool college kids and hip young adults is Cee-Lo’s “sunny take on classic soul,” F*** You. This fall’s top single for the prepubescent crowd is Fred Figglehorn‘s family-friendly, feel-good anthem, Who’s Ready to Party? The latest single from the YouTube phenom’s upcoming studio album was released yesterday to coincide with the basic cable television premiere of his made-for-Nickelodeon movie.

So, who is ready to party? Judging by the ratings for Fred: The Movie, you are Fred. You are.

The 8PM EST showing on Saturday night turned out to be basic cable’s top TV movie in 2010 with kids 2 to 11 and 6 to 11 (which, despite being almost concentric circles in the same Venn Diagram, are apparently different advertising demos). It drew over 7.6 million total viewers, including 3.3 million kids 6 to 11; 3.1 million Tweens 9 to 14; and 4.0 million kids 2 to 11 (which, when you get rid of dupes, apparently totals 7.6 million).

The movie was conceived by Brian Robbins, directed by Clay Weiner, written by David A. Goodman, produced by Robbins and Sharla Sumpter Bridgett of Varsity Pictures and Gary Binkow and Evan Weiss of The Collective, and stars the creator of YouTube’s second most subscribed to channel of all time, Lucas Cruikshank as Fred Figglehorn. It also features “iCarly’s Jennette McCurdy as Bertha, British teen sensation Pixie Lott as Judy, WWE’s John Cena as Fred’s dad, and Siobhan Fallon as Fred’s mom.”

Here’s a brief synopsis:

The film follows Fred after he discovers his long-time crush, Judy has moved away. Fred embarks on a journey to find her, and when he does, he’s devastated that he hasn’t been invited to her party. This blow fuels a grand scheme that ultimately makes Fred cooler than his classmates could ever imagine.

Though if you prefer a complete play-by-play and/or reviews as told by enthusiastic youngins, check out drenkeeg’s run-on-sentence rundown, or watch AlexNuisance‘s take (“It’s both good and crap at the same time!”), or hear andrewroxman‘s balanced opinions, or check out the tens and soon-to-be hundreds of YouTube video commentaries on the film.

If you missed Fred: The Movie, you can catch it again on Friday, September 24 on Nickeledeon, or buy the DVD available October 5. After that, if you want yourself some more Cruikshank on the small screen, you’ll have to wait until 2011. Next year he’s set to start in Nickelodeon’s live-action, Mork and Mindy-esque sitcom, Marvin and Marvin.

Filed under: Comedy, Featured, Fred, News, Nickelodeon, YouTube by Joshua Cohen
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Brightcove is an online video platform geared towards major media companies with “more than 1,800 customers in 48 countries, which operate video across nearly 10,00 websites.” Tubemogul is an “online video analytics and advertising platform that processes billions of video streams every month” from over 200,000 users.

In 2008, Brightcove licensed Tubemogul’s InPlay technology to provide its customer base with a robust analytics tool. Now the two companies are collaborating to release quarterly online video research reports.

In Online Video & the Media Industry, Brightcove and Tubemogul looked at data from a cross-section of Brightcove’s customer base from the previous two quarters. They came away with some interesting findings.

Newspapers and Magazines are Pushing a lot of Online Video
The BP oil spill had at least two unintentional beneficiaries: YouTube’s ad network and the online video departments at newspaper websites. In Q2 2010, online video streams from newspapers’ online destinations grew by more than 65 percent.

In the past quarter, newspapers and magazines have also generated a respective 2.3 billion and 1.3 billion video player loads, up over 38% from Q2 2009.

In the View Battle of On-Site vs. Embeds, On-Site Wins
Whether it’s due to a restrictive embed culture from some major media publishers, the “premium long-form nature of their content,” or a sign that big portals are winning the online video traffic game, only 1.9% of major broadcasters’ video views occurred via embeds. Newspapers had the highest number of views via embeds at 13.6%. Magazines, music videos, radio, and pure play online media properties came somewhere in between the two.

Viewers also tend to spend less time watching embeds, with the exception of video coming from pure play online media properties. Your average view time for videos from online media properties is 1:32 on-site, and 1:45 if it’s embedded. Views on major broadcasters’ destinations clock in at 3 minutes on-site, and only 1:59 off.

Facebook Refers More Video Views than Twitter
Which makes sense given Facebook has 500 million active users to Twitter’s 190+ million. Google’s still bigger than both of them, accounting for 64% of third party traffic, followed by Yahoo at 11.9%, Facebook at 4.3%, Bing at 2.6%, and Twitter at 1.2%.

All of those referrers, however, account for less than 20% of all video streams. 81.9% of video streams “were discovered via direct traffic or navigation within a publisher’s own site.”

Download the PDF of the full report here.

Generic picture of attractive lady with glasses looking at newspaper in front of a graph by Statsheet.com.

Filed under: Articles, News by Joshua Cohen
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Today Break Media and brand partner Toyota launched Standup Stories: “My First Ride”, an original web series featuring six standup comedians who share the story of their first car experience—part of Toyota’s recent Camry and Corolla “Auto-Biography” campaign.

Break Media’s Creative Lab, Toyota, and advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi teamed up with Primetime Emmy award-winning standup comedy director Rocco Urbisci to produce the five-episode series, the first three of which premiered today on Toyota’s dedicated custom channel on Break.com.

Standup Stories: “My First Ride” recorded comedians Bret Ernst, Dean Edwards, Ian Bagg, Daryl Wright, and Carlie & Doni doing their shtick in front of a live 75-member audience at the historic Improv Comedy Club in Hollywood.

This isn’t Toyota’s first campaign with Break; Standup Stories: “My First Ride” comes on the heels of a successful distribution partner for Toyota’s “Rollin’ In My Swagger Wagon” campaign for the 2011 Toyota Sienna MiniVan, whose video garnered over 6 million views on YouTube.

Filed under: Articles, Channels, News, Web Series by Drew Baldwin
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Takashi Murakami is Japan’s Andy Warhol. He conceptualizes popular Otaku themes as subjects for high art masterpieces, and then repurposes the motifs again for mass commercial consumption. Along with Yoshimoto Nara, Murakami helped rejuvenate contemporary Japanese art and make lonesome, anime-inspired, self-pleasuring cowboys with amazing control of their bodily fluids the Campbell’s soup cans of Japan.

He’s also one of 13 judges for YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video.

Earlier this summer, in collaboration with HP and Intel, YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum asked online video auteurs to submit works of “animation, motion graphics, narrative, non-narrative, or documentary work, music videos and entirely new art forms – creations that really challenge the world’s perceptions of what’s possible with video,” in hopes of showcasing digital media as a respectable medium for high art.

YouTube announced today that YouTube Play received over 23,000 submissions from over 91 countries. The Guggenheim curatorial team narrowed those submissions down to a shortlist 125 videos long. YouTube Play‘s esteemed jury will now make up to 20 selections to showcase online and at a special Guggenheim exhibit in late October.

Murakami’s excited to watch the submissions, exclaiming how YouTube incites artists with a revolutionary spirit and also terrifies them with a Katana. I’m not quite sure what that means, but I know you should be excited, too. If you head over to the YouTube Play channel, a click on any of the shortlisted videos is worth your while. Submissions range from “students, video artists, photographers, filmmakers, composers, video game programmers, an American Women’s Chess Champion, a comedy improv group, a Swedish rock band, a South African hip-hop group, an Australian electronic music producer – and a lot more.”

It’ll be interesting to see which videos make it into the museum and if YouTube Play can help shift cultural conceptions of YouTube and digital media at large. If the site and medium can be as well known for art as it is for music videos and laughing baby brothers with cannibalistic tendencies, maybe Murakami and future artists will compete digital for shows in cyber space instead of real estate in a museum.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, News, YouTube by Joshua Cohen
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WME Entertainment—you know, Endeavor’s new name after its shotgun wedding with agency with William Morris—has apparently helped score $300 million for private equity media fund for The Raine Group, in which the agency owns a sizable stake.

The one year-old Raine Group, run by former Goldman Sachs banker Joe Ravitch and former UBS partner Jeff Sine, was able to raise the private equity fund to invest in content across all sorts of media—”from content providers like global comic book brands to sports leagues to ‘really anything but not to make movies or television’, according to Nikki Finke and her venerable sources.

We’ve been saying for a while now how someone needed to raise a fund for original online content, ready to commit the kind of dollars needed to garner some blockbuster level attention. To be sure, this new Raine fund will be placing bets all over the map. But a content fund that size that doesn’t aim spend its cash on film or television, has quite the tank of gas to make moves online.

So, content creators, dust off your pitch decks—even those cooky 68-page 3D transmedia concepts—as it looks like Raine might be the latest (and biggest) trough that the industry lines up for. And you won’t have far to travel if you’re on the coasts. According to Finke, Raine has been operating out of WME’s New York office but will also take over space in WME’s headquarters in Beverly Hills.

The new $300 million fund is reportedly coming from international investors, including foreign government investment funds from the China, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi, through its state-owned Mubadala Development Company. Not surprisingly, the firm also plans to open up a Beijing office.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Industry, News by Marc Hustvedt
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Seth Weintraub wrote a great piece today on 9 to 5 Mac about the newly redesigned AppleTV‘s AirPlay functionality that will allow users to stream video, music, and photos from their iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch directly to their TVs. As Apple describes it:

You can already stream music, photos, and video from your computer to Apple TV. With AirPlay, you can stream it all from your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, too. So if you feel like watching a movie you have on one of your devices, you don’t need to rent or buy it again. Just tap to start playing content on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, then tap again to instantly stream whatever you’re watching—or listening to—directly to Apple TV. AirPlay is coming soon to an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch near you.

In fact, according to MacRumors, iOS 4.2 Beta users have already reported being able to stream audio to AirPlay enabled devices. The question that remained, however was “how protected content works such as Hulu.” But more interestingly, as one of the Beta users spimp31 clarified on Mac Forums, “You can now stream from any app that does quicktime video or audio.” What spimp31 should have said was “you can only stream from any app that does quicktime”—a key difference.

Weintraub recalls that a few months ago Steve Jobs told audiences from the AllThingsD conference that what has been holding back Google and Apple from success in the TV space is the lack of a successful “go to market TV strategy.” That strategy, it turns out, is AirPlay. AirPlay-enabled devices aren’t just playing iTunes content but rather any H.264 (Apple’s proprietary video codec) content on the web. This, according to Weintraub,

includes any video that can play on your iOS 4.2 device, like: Facebook video, YouTube, Netflix, Videos, BBC News, MLB and really anything else you can watch on your iOS device. That also includes videos built into Apps and magazine subscriptions too. All of this can be beamed to your AppleTV via AirPlay.

The onslaught of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch—all devices which do not support Flash—has pushed content producers to a tipping point between Flash and H.264. And AirTunes may be the straw that breaks Flash’s back. AppleTV’s vision of the living room experience is a consumer using the iOS device in hand as both a discovery tool and a remote. Surf the internet, find something cool, throw it up on the TV. Bam. This is why the AppleTV has no hard drive, uses little power, and costs only $99. The AppleTV is simply a video interface for the iOS device.

And if Flash distributors don’t get wise, they are going to be left in the dust.

Filed under: Articles, Devices, Industry, News by Drew Baldwin
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Monday, October 4th at 11PM EST, the long awaited web series The Resistance will make its debut in a most unlikely place, cable television.

Syfy will air the series as a one hour special in place of its Ani-Monday animation block. This might be the first time a series created originally for the web will first premiere on TV.

The cable network will package episodes of The Resistance web series and air them back to back, along with approximately 9 minutes of behind the scenes footage in order to reach the 44 minute television runtime.

Following the TV broadcast, the series will revert to online video form. Viewers will be able to watch The Resistance in two parts on Xbox Live, Hulu and other distribution channels before it eventually lands on YouTube in four- to five-minute installments. If the series performs well, Starz will greenlight the program as a TV show or web series, and possibly even develop the property into a feature film.

The Resistance director, Adrian Picardi explained the genesis of the project and the partnership with Starz over e-mail:

The Resistance first got started after I had met up with Scott Bayless and Eric Ro back in late 2007. We decided to partner up and form a company called Northern Five Entertainment. Scott Bayless really helped giving us the tools and resources we needed to create The Resistance trailers and from those trailers we were approached by Ghost House Pictures and Starz Media.

When the first Resistance trailer debuted on YouTube in December, 2007, it promised to be a stylistic, action-packed show. Subsequent trailers only heightened the anticipation; however, as the months rolled on, the likelihood that the series would ever air seemed less certain. In 2008, Starz picked up the series and had it re-shot with better equipment and a budget rumored to be in the low six figures. But that had been the last word we heard from the producers about the series’ fate, until now.

The show’s storyline follows Syrus Primoris (Adrian Zaw), a chemist, who in exchange for absolute power provides the only known suppressant for a deadly plague. Opposing the tyrannical rule of the would-be world savior is Lana (Katrina Law), leader of the Aurordecan Resistance Movement.

While The Resistance is hardly the first web series to make the leap to television, it might be the first to do so by skipping its online debut entirely. Starz Media’s newfangled distribution and marketing strategy for the show further blurs the lines between online and traditional content. It also begs the question, “If it first debuts on television, can it still be called a web series?”

Filed under: Articles, Featured, News, Studios, Web Series by Mathieas McNaughton
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ITV Studios announced that on November 1st, they will be launching Corrie Nation, a social networking game based on ITV1’s incredibly long-running soap opera Coronation Street. Initially, it will only be available on ITV.com and Facebook, but other platforms are expected to follow.

Created to be a “parallel world” to the TV show, players will build and manage the famous neighborhood of Weatherfield and its populace with gameplay that sounds like a cross between The Sims and Sim City… with a dash of Days of Our Lives thrown in. Your “understanding of what builds drama” will help you get the highest score.

I have no idea what that means, but I’m certainly intrigued.

Part of the fun seems to be the interaction between the show and the game, since you can play as your favorite characters and make them do what you think they should be doing in current storylines. Based on what people make characters do, a consensus poll will illuminate what the audience thinks should be happening on the show. I’m unclear on whether audience opinion will actually reflect what happens on screen, but it does seem one step closer to a choose you own adventure method of storytelling.

But even if gamers can’t affect what’s happening on screen, they will at least be able to learn about plot points ahead of time by exchanging game points for storyline spoilers, which will be presented in the game as “psychic predictions” from characters. Over 60 characters both past and present of the long running soap will be available for fans to use in their game spaces.

ITV Studios tapped game developer Enteraction, the social gaming subsidiary of etv media group, to produce Corrie Nation using their new social games framework dubbed Gameshaper.

All in all, it sounds like an intriguing addition to the world of the show, and an interesting way to keep viewers actively engaged in a show—even when it’s not currently airing.

Filed under: Alternate Reality Game (ARG), Articles, Drama, News by Josh Weiss-Roessler
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Bands embracing online video is nothing new. Since OK Go’s treadmill ballet went into seven-figure view counts, any group of individuals trying to make it in music have understood the importance, power, and prevalence of the medium. But what is new are the different ways bands embrace online video. Take, for instance, Guster.

It’s been almost a decade since I’ve listened to Barrel of a Gun, but the band from Boston that built its name on hand percussion recently showed up on my radar. To help promote the upcoming October 5 release of their sixth studio album, Easy to Wonderful, Guster is premiering a dozen music videos, one for each track. The catch? All were created by friends, fans, or artists the band loves, and “everyone was given absolute free reign to create whatever they felt.”

Currently, music videos for two of the 12 songs are live. Chad Carlberg‘s stop-motion rendition of Guster as a high-school band in a performance art piece singing Do You Love Me, and One Degree Off‘s cardboard cutout and shadow puppet theatre interpretation of Stay With Me Jesus. Both are great. Sure, they’re no Telephone, but if Guster every got airtime on MTV2 and you caught one of these music videos, you wouldn’t question why they were there. They’re professional and look pretty from a production standpoint, engaging from a community point of view, and with a $0 price tag, incredibly cost effective according to Guster’s balance sheet.

If you’re a fan of Guster or just like making things the filmmaking community on Vimeo would adore, you’re in luck. Turns out the band fell one director short and needs a video for Bad Bad World. Instructions on how to make Guster your muse, and a music video for their song your masterpiece, can be viewed on the Easy Wonderful website. Check out all the other music videos for the album there, too. Happy listening, filming, and viewing.

Filed under: Articles, News by Joshua Cohen
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