Fans of YouTube’s most favorite anthropomorphic fruit with a penchant for puns will be able to catch his kitchen antics on television screens sometime in the first half of 2012.

Cartoon Network picked up a 15-episode order of The Annoying Orange TV series from creator Dane Boedigheimer and “full-service entertainment management, media and content production company” The Collective back in November. As Boedigheimer told us, ““Basically the plan is to really take advantage of TV’s longer format and expand the AO world way beyond what it is on YouTube…really dive into the characters and their personalities.”

But television and Cartoon Network aren’t the only places to which The Annoying Orange is expanding. You can currently find the irritating little guy in your local neighborhood Toys “R” Us and JCPenney.

The Collective teamed up with toymaker The Bridge Direct (the same company that makes miniature likenesses of Justin Bieber, complete with his contemporary hair style) to produce a line of kitschy and cool products including talking plushes, clip-ons, and collectible figures based on Orange and the entire Kitchen Crew (of Pear, Midget Apple, Grandpa Lemon, Marshmallow, and Passion Fruit).

While Toys “R” Us is selling Annoying Orange playthings, JCPenney, Shopko, and Rue 21 are taking care of the wearables. The Collective partnered with the trio of brick and mortar and online clothing retailers for a handful of Annoying Orange short-sleeved cotton crewnecks featuring “classic jokes and themes from the popular series.”

Branded products from popular web series certainly isn’t a navel idea (get it?!), but this is the first time we’ve seen those branded products sold by stores with nationwide footprints and household names. Here’s Michael Green, CEO and Founder of The Collective, on how the initiatives came to be:

We firmly believe that properties that have scale online will also have major appeal beyond the web. We currently have a stand alone, fully scaled business online for The Annoying Orange and our partnership with Cartoon Network will  just provide another layer of exposure.

This is why we made the deliberate decision to execute a merchandising program now with first-rate partners like Toys “R” Us, JCPenney, and toymaker The Bridge. We could have waited until the television show debuted, but with the incredible momentum of the YouTube show and our retail partners embracing the new products, it’s clear that we made the right decision in taking The Annoying Orange into stores in time for the holiday season.

Pick up your Annoying Orange holiday toys and T-shirts, and check out our Tubefilter Holiday Gift Guide for more inspiration on what to get that special online video fan in your life.

Filed under: Annoying Orange, Articles, Branded Entertainment, Featured, News, The Collective Digital Studio, YouTube by Joshua Cohen
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One of the biggest numbers to come out the latest installment of comScore’s US online video rankings is the number of minutes denizens of America spent watching online video ads in November. It was 3.08 billion.

That’s over 5,707 years(!) worth of online video ads viewed in a single 30-day period, which is a crazy statistic, but not so crazy when you take those minutes and divide them by the 183,160,000 monthly US internet users. Then the number equals out to just under 16 minutes and 49 seconds worth of online video advertising viewed per person, which is about one minute and 11 seconds shy of the amount of commercials and promotional spots you watch in one hour of television.

Of those 3.08 billion minutes of online video advertising, premium on demand movie and television destination Hulu accounted for 18.3% or 565 million minutes. Tremor Video clocked in at 594 million minutes for 19.2% of the total share and Adap.tv‘s ads represented 17.9% of the 3.08 billion for 551 million minutes.

Check out comScore’s Novermber US Online Video Rankings for other fun facts and figures.

Filed under: Articles, comScore, Featured, Hulu, Industry, News by Joshua Cohen
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YouTube announced a new application that enables gamers to watch videos right on the Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console.

The YouTube app allows viewers explore the most popular trending videos, delve into a category to discover something new, get help with their gaming, or search for any video they want. The new app will be useful for gamers who rely on reviews, cheats, and walkthroughs on YouTube as part of their gaming experience.

Xbox has pioneered over-the-top technologies to get online programming on televisions, and since the launch of The Guild on the Xbox, has been an inspiration for cord-cutters worldwide.

IGN Entertainment released a video demo for the new YouTube app, thoroughly explaining its features. YouTube has divided their app into four different categories: my YouTube, Featured, Discover, and Search. Here’s a breakdown:

• my YouTube: See recommended videos, mark clips to watch later, view your own uploads, and access your playlists.
• Featured: Aggregated and promoted videos that are most popular and most liked and showcase YouTube trends
• Discover: Browse different video categories like Animation, Film & Entertainment, and Gaming.
• Search: A bit challenging, users must use their controllers (or motion control) to hunt and peck letters in the alphabet for the search bar—though plans are in the works for voice command search using Connect.

Filed under: Articles, Channels, Featured, Industry, News, YouTube by Drew Baldwin
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Do you want to voice a cartoon? (Correct answer: “Do I?!?”) Would you like to contribute to an online original animation network created by the heavyweight behind hits The Faily OddParents, Johnny Bravo, and Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! that’s been disseminating high-quality cartoons to the internet masses from both basement-dwelling amateurs and studio-financed professionals since way back in 2005? (Correct Answer: “You already had me at ‘Do you want to voice a cartoon?’”)

If you answered correctly, then watch one or all of these videos – Reindeer Power, Major League Dreidel’s Spinagogue, Au sommet du monde le Roi a Froid, Super 8, Zombie Claymation, Ride With a Stranger, Snow Business – call this number – 917-408-Fred – and leave a message.

Fred Seibert’s Channel Frederator is making a new holiday video and they want to hear what you have to say about the cartoons they’re going to feature. Here’s Channel Frederatorer Brad O’Farrell on the interactive initiative:

“We’re using social media to create a conversation about the content we’re featuring. We’re using a Google Voice number to get feedback on the cartoons we’re linking to on Tumblr and Twitter and then incorporating that voicemail audio into the YouTube episodes of Channel Frederator, which will serve as the lead-in and interstitials on a YouTube playlist.

In the future we hope to be able to incorporate YouTube’s new broadcast feature to send out links of other people’s cartoons to our subscribers, along with the Google Voice number, so that the full interactive experience of the show could be had entirely on YouTube, rather than requiring a combination of YouTube and other sites.”

This isn’t the first time Frederator’s played around with voicemail (user messages have been featured in Frederator installments since at least 2007), nor is it the first time Seibert and co. have included fans in Frederator content creation (the company’s Drinking and Drawing events are fantastic).

Once you’ve had your fun critiquing cartoons you can also give Wreck and Salvage’s apocalypse hotline a call and plan for the imminent end of days by stockpiling necessary (and absurd) supplies care of Suppendapo.

Filed under: Animated, Articles, Channel Frederator, Comedy, Featured, Interactive, News by Joshua Cohen
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Maker Studios has greenlit another season of original online series Epic Rap Battles of History.

One of the few online series to garner over  300 million views and more than one million subscribers in under a year, Epic Rap Battles of History is a live-action music comedy series where historical characters settle their differences through rap battles, and stars popular internet personalities Nice Peter and EpicLLOYD.

Season two kicks off with the highly anticipated rematch Darth Vader vs. Hitler, Mario Brothers vs. The Wright Brothers, and promises guest-star roles featuring a wide variety of online, television and film talent.

Tubefilter caught up with Pete and Lloyd who shared their thoughts on Season 2:

In season 2 of the Epic Rap Battles of History, we’re going to stay on the same path on which we started. Me and Lloyd, working with Maker Studios and the rest of our incredible team, will take the most gangsta characters from history, (i.e. Socrates, Hillary Clinton, etc.) and let them duke it out with rhymes. Simple formula.

We are rolling out a whole new line of merchandise for our fans because we want them to be able to represent this series that we all love.

The main new component of the website is a voting station. Every battle ends with “Who won? Who’s next? You decide.” We want to learn more about what our fans are thinking. Up until now it has been limited to YouTube comments, with each battle receiving as many as 200k.

Last season, which featured battles Napoleon Bonaparte vs. Napoleon Dynamite, Beethoven vs. Justin Bieber, and John Lennon vs. Bill O’Reilly, averaged 20 million views per episode. Who do you want to see battle? We’ll pass on suggestions!

Filed under: Articles, Comedy, Featured, Industry, News, Web Series, YouTube by Drew Baldwin
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Louis Szekely, aka Louis CK, the comedian and TV producer known for his cult-classic FX series, Louie, today announced a digital distribution strategy that may just prove ground-shifting.

It’s a tired trope among us new media types. In this more open and fragmented entertainment world, producers will wield more control with ever-evolving business models. At the same time, consumers will demand more control. Sure enough, as cable subscribers defect, a creator-controlled al-la-carte model is spearheaded by a seasoned industry trailblazer.

Four days after posting Louis C.K. live at the Beacon Theater on his website at $5 for an unencumbered video file, Szekely has sold over 110,00 copies. That makes for more than $500,000 in total sales and a profit of about $200,000 (and counting). He, and bigger names, will surely continue to exploit this now proven model.

We can’t say this is ground-breaking, however. Similar pay-per-view strategies have been attempted on the web time and again by both upstarts and some very established talent. But, to date, no one has demonstrated such striking success with television-style video.

Interestingly, Szekely’s audience surely discovered him through established media outlets, without whose previous support his experiment would have gone largely unnoticed. The network model is surely not dying, but it will  likely become more flexible as creator’s discover a new kind of leverage with unlimited control.

Filed under: Articles, Comedy, Featured, Industry, News by Jamison Tilsner
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Everyone has witnessed tragic events in the workplace since the economic depression. We have seen people leave their desk, never to return. When that happens, It’s almost insidious how quickly human resources collects the personal items of the now departed and wipes away any trace of their white collar existence. We have all seen these events, but now we can see them with….wait for it….puppets….and….wait for it….aliens!?

A new series from creators Kyra and Kozi Kyles, Human Resources explores the dark underbelly of corporate America, but uses puppets and a sci-fi premise to provide a comedic take on unpleasant circumstances.

“The topic of layoffs is always tough to talk about, and even tougher to watch,” said Kyra Kyles over email.  “We’re hoping Human Resources will bring some comic relief to an ugly situation.”

The science fiction twist is what makes Human Resources unique, as opposed to being just another Office Space rip off or online original about cubicle hi-jinks. “The concept is actually based on my own work horror story,” Said Kozi Kyles. “I worked for a company that started doing layoffs, but kept all of the employees in the dark. It was totally mysterious, like an episode of The Twilight Zone.”

The puppets may seem odd at first (at least I thought so), but as the  monsters, mysterious deaths and other X-Files type situations come into the storyline, they appear at least semi-normal by comparison. If you are interested in watching a series that is a combination of The X-Files and Sesame Street, complete with interstitials of How-To Layoff Tips delivered by actual humans, than Human Resources is the web series for you.

The 11-episode series will release new installments every Wednesday at HRTheSeries.com.

Filed under: Articles, Comedy, Featured, News, Reviews, Web Series by Chris Landa
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Veteran reality producer Mark Burnett wants to change the way you watch television.

Mark Burnett has teamed up with technology company ACTV8.ME to enable audiences with an iPhone, iPad, or Android device to interact, socialize, consume, share, and participate in real time, all the while watching his or her favorite TV shows.

In making the deal with ACTV8, Burnett explains, “It has always been my dream to create a deeper and more engaging relationship with the audiences of our shows. ACTV8 enables us to give the audience exactly what they want: interactivity, metadata, behind the scenes views, scoops and insights, social relevance and connectivity. Today’s audience brings a whole new set of expectations from the shows they connect to and embrace. ACTV8 allows our content to take a much more important and relevant position for consumption within the changing lifestyles of our viewers. This breakthrough technology serves to foster a world of New Era TV Networks.”

ACTV8’s “complete global media integration platform” synchronies a user’s mobile device or tablet to any live or recorded video broadcast. It not only provides rich interactive content related to the programming, but also integrates into social media sites.

The growth of DVR adoption has led to a decline in TV ad spot value, and ACTV8’s platform may be able to reinvent the value proposition for advertising around TV properties. By finding a way to marry broadcast and cable television to the two largest social media platforms on the planet, they may have just cracked open the ultimate über-platform.

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Filed under: Articles, Featured, Industry, News by Drew Baldwin
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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(?!?).

“Fans are asking for more custom flavors,” according to Murphy, “There’s definitely opportunity for more Epic Meal Time branded products in the future.”

This isn’t the first time Revision3’s dealt with branded edibles. Adagio Teas sells a line of Tekzilla and Diggnation Signature Blends.

You can check out J&D’s line of Epic Meal Time bacon whatnot and more online video-branded products in our Tubefilter Holiday Gift Guide. Give it at watch:

Filed under: Articles, Branded Entertainment, Comedy, Featured, News, Revision3, Web Series, YouTube by Joshua Cohen
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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 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.

Sheppard and Humphrey compose the script of those terribly ordinary things girls say by culling the best installments of their Shit Girls Say Twitter account. The pair have been poking fun at stereotypically female sayings since this Spring, amassing over 57,000 followers in the process.

No word yet on when future episodes will be released, but in the mean time, enjoy. Especially you ladies. As XX chromosome and Tubefilter contributor Brittany Sandler says, “Man, this show’s got my gender down!”

Filed under: Articles, Comedy, Featured, News, Web Series by Joshua Cohen
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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.

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Filed under: Articles, Featured, Industry, News, YouTube by Drew Baldwin
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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.

Filed under: Articles, Channels, Comedy, Featured, Industry, News, Web Series by Joshua Cohen
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