Archive for 2015:

Female YouTube Stars Join Lilly Singh To Promote #GirlLove

Lilly Singh has a New Year’s resolution she wants to enact, and she hopes her female fans will join her. The online video star, who has more than 7.4 million subscribers on her IISuperwomanII channel, enlisted the help of 18 other female YouTubers as she launched her #GirlLove campaign, which promotes positive interactions between women.

As Singh explains in a video introducing #GirlLove, she hopes to spread good vibes and reduce the degree to which women bully, tease, or belittle each other. “The sad reality is that girl-on-girl hate is such a big issue in schools, at work, or online,” she says, “and it never made any sense to me, because as women, we know how awesome other women can be.”

Many of Singh’s colleagues on YouTube appeared in her video to second her message. Her collaborators on this project are a diverse bunch, ranging from beauty stars like Kandee Johnson to musicians like Lindsey Stirling to comedians like Grace Helbig, Mamrie Hart, and Hannah Hart. Their combined message, however, is united: Women deserve better than to face verbal abuse from their peers.

After posting her video, Singh took her hashtag to Twitter, where it has been picked up by YouTube’s official account, Tyra Banks, and many others. The proliferation of the hashtag will bring attention to Singh’s video, and that in turn will result in a donation to charity, as Singh plans to donate all the income she gains from the video to the Malala Fund. Here’s hoping for an outpouring of love from Singh’s fans, her fellow online video creators, and the Internet community at large.

Yarn App Lets Users Share Video Clips, Aims To Improve Video Search

Finding and sharing specific moments in videos just got a little easier. A new video search startup called Yarn lets users search for clips from their favorite movies, TV shows, and music videos and share them with friends or family.

Founded in 2015 by friends Chris Butler and Jeffrey Krause, Yarn is currently available for desktop and on the Facebook Messenger app. On the app’s site, users can search for their favorite lyrics or quotes from movies, TV shows, and music videos and share the resulting clips on social sites like Twitter and Pinterest. Yarn’s newly-launched mobile app takes sharing clips one step farther. Through the Yarn app, users can search for video clips and then tap a button to send them to Messenger conversations. They can also search for clips to replace their emoticons, like using a clip from Beyonce’s “Halo” track instead of the emoji of a smiley face with a halo.

Yarn was born out of Butler and Krause’s dislike of current video search technologies. The two business partners, who each held previous positions at Intel, have worked on media-related apps and products in the past, but video search was always a flawed area Butler and Krause wanted to improve. As such, the two looked to YouTube and start working on Yarn’s tech, which utilizes AI programs, user interactions, and user demographics to help pinpoint talkable moments in video.

“YouTube is part of our inspiration to build the tool. It’s very hard to find specific moments in time in YouTube clips… scrubbing is just not fun, at least for us,” said Butler, as reported by TechCrunch. “And while there are some videos that are short, the vast majority are long – and by long, I mean longer than 15-30 seconds. Try finding a specific quote inside Donald Trump’s candidacy announcement, for example. We wanted to be able to look very precisely at what moments users discovered and treasured, what they skipped over, what they liked, and have precision on clips to hundredths of a second.”

In the future, Butler hopes Yarn can partner with businesses and platforms beyond Facebook Messenger who’d like to improve their reach through video search functions. For example, Butler says Yarn’s clips can act “more like advertisements” for content companies to help direct internet users back to those companies’ sites or original sources. Yarn currently has a political version of its app in private beta, as well as a few partners on board who use Yarn’s tech to search through and categorize their own video content.

You can learn more about Yarn on the app’s site, or download Yarn via the iTunes App Store or Google Play.

Meow Mix Crowns Top Felines With Cat’s Meow Awards

How better to wrap up 2015 than by recognizing some of the year’s top cat videos? Meow Mix has done just that with the Cat’s Meow Awards, which recognize outstanding felines in three different categories.

The Cat’s Meow nominees were selected from more than 25,000 submissions culled from cat owners across the United States. The winners were then chosen by the Meow Mix Acatemy, a community of cat lovers hosted by the well-known cat food brand. Finally, on the Meow Mix YouTube channel, a pair of narrators oversee the ceremonies and crown the top cats in three categories: “Cat Cuddle,” “Cat-hlete,” and “Wild Cat Card.”

The Cat’s Meow Awards support Meow Mix’s charitable efforts; the brand plans to give away 50,000 free treats from its Irresistables line. More information about that campaign can be found here.

Given their brand sponsorship, their celebration of Internet kitties, and their ties to charity, the Cat’s Meow Awards will remind some cat lovers of The Friskies, Purina’s own annual feline award suite. There are some noticeable differences, however, between the two programs. Compared to The Friskies, the Cat’s Meow Awards are more-heavily branded and less associated with the online video community at large. The main attraction, however, is the same in both cases: The Cat’s Meow Awards, like The Friskies, are all about cute pet moments, and in that regard, they deliver.

BRIDES Magazine, Audiences Will Help YouTube Star Elle Fowler Plan Her Wedding

Beauty, fashion, and lifestyle vlogger Elle Fowler (also known as AllThatGlitters21) is getting married, and BRIDES Magazine wants to help her prepare for the big day. For the upcoming 2016 season of the BRIDES Live Wedding web series, the wedding publication brand will let audiences help plan elements of Fowler’s nuptials.

Produced in partnership with Collective Digital Studio (CDS), the four-part BRIDES Live Wedding series featuring Fowler will take viewers through the 27-year-old vlogger’s entire wedding planning process. BRIDES editors will help plan portions of Fowler’s wedding that web series viewers (including any of Fowler’s 1.3 million YouTube subscribers) can vote on, such as the digital creator’s honeymoon, wedding-day look, bridal gown, and more. Fowler’s BRIDES Live Wedding episodes will incorporate products and services from sponsors including Monique Lhuillier, Sandals Resorts, and Mary Kay.

“Through her YouTube channel, Elle Fowler helps girls with beauty, fashion, and lifestyle advice, which is very in line with what we do for women as we guide them from engagement through the big day and beyond,” said Keija Minor, editor in chief of BRIDES, in a release. “We look forward to working with our online audience to plan her the wedding of a lifetime.”

“I am so excited to be working alongside the BRIDES team to plan my dream wedding,” added Fowler. “With the BRIDES editors behind my ceremony and reception, I know everything is going to be perfect. I wouldn’t trust my wedding planning to anyone else!”

This is the second time CDS and BRIDES have teamed up for the BRIDES Live Wedding series. In May 2015, the two companies helped plan an American couple’s wedding with the help of YouTube stars Chelsea Briggs, Alexandrea Garza, and Meghan Rienks. Each digital creator contributed her area of expertise to the series’ creation: Briggs hosted the episodes, Garza helped with wedding decor ideas, and Rienks provided beauty and hair advice for the bride-to-be.

You can participate in the planning of Fowler’s wedding some time in 2016 via Brides.com or the official BRIDES YouTube channel.

Crackle Drops Trailer For Season Seven Of Jerry Seinfeld’s ‘Comedians In Cars’

Crackle has provided a sneak peek at the next season of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Sony’s streaming platform and distributor released the show’s season seven trailer on December 21, 2015.

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee season seven boasts a lineup of some well-known comedic talent. In the six upcoming episodes (the first of which debuts on Crackle on December 30), Seinfeld will ride around town in classic cars and stop to get coffee with Will Ferrell, Steve Martin, Garry Shandling, Kathleen Madigan, and Sebastian Maniscalco. The new Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee trailer boasts over 580,000 views on YouTube alone, the most views of any YouTube trailer for the series to date. The trailer isn’t faring so badly on Facebook, either; on that platform, the clip boasts 96,000 views and almost 7,000 likes, shares, and comments.

Crackle announced back in April 2014 it was renewing Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee for another 24 episodes, enough to get the show through a ninth season. The series’ sixth season premiered in June 2015, with Seinfeld chatting and laughing with his old Seinfeld co-star Julia-Louis Dreyfus. More recently, Crackle announced the first guest on season seven of Comedians in Cars would be none other than the President of the United States Barack Obama himself.

Season seven of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee will debut on Crackle.com and its corresponding apps on December 30. New episodes will be available every Wednesday.

The Game Theorist Wonders If Facebook And YouTube Are Actually Competitors

2015 is all but in the books, and as it wraps up, Matthew Patrick has delivered an “end-of-the-year meta-theory.” The man behind the Game Theorists YouTube channel has released a video in which he analyses the battle between Facebook and YouTube and predicts the future of the latter site.

When he’s not busy offering crazy theories about pop culture franchises, Patrick is an online video consultant who uses his deep knowledge of the industry to advise his fellow creators. Last December, he shared his knowledge with viewers by explaining PewDiePie’s “broken” subscription box, and 12 months later, he has returned with another theory about the state of YouTube. This time, he focuses his discussion on two projects released on the same day: The annual YouTube Rewind, and Facebook’s 2015 Year in Review.

Given their similar premises–they both recap the year that was in digital media–it would be easy to use the two projects to emphasize the growing battle between Facebook and YouTube. Patrick, however, isn’t interested in that comparison. Instead, he uses the two projects to point out the differences between the two major video platforms. Facebook, he notes, is a place where users react to the outside world, while YouTube offers a more insular experience centered around its own community. “You go to Facebook to see what people think about the huge thing that happened off of Facebook,” says Patrick in the video. “While YouTube acknowledges events in the wider world, it also has a culture all to itself that only it understands.”

The point behind Patrick’s comparison is that Facebook and YouTube aren’t necessary competitors; they serve separate cultures, or, as Patrick puts it, “two different generations.” “Just because both are websites that allow you to upload, comment on, and share videos doesn’t make them exactly the same,” he later adds. “You go to them for completely different reasons.”

Patrick could have ended his video there, but instead he chooses to take his meta-theory a step further. He suggests that, while YouTube Rewind epitomizes the site’s culture, it could soon become out-of-date. He notes a few factors, including YouTube’s increased emphasis on watch time, its compartmentalization of its top categories, and its desire to stream Hollywood movies and TV shows, that taken together forecast a shift away from YouTube’s current focus and toward a more commercial one. “Comparing the Rewinds was meant to show what makes YouTube unique and different when compared to other video platforms…but as you segregate gamers from beauty gurus or try to bring in a bunch of TV shows, step by step you slowly risk losing what makes YouTube YouTube.

Patrick’s argument is certainly a crowd-pleaser. It appeals to creators who feel as if YouTube is increasingly catering to major media companies at the expense of its own community. At the same time, buying into his point-of-view requires some selective thinking. Patrick mentions that many of the premium programs slated for release on the subscription-based YouTube Red platform come from homegrown online video stars. To believe YouTube will be dominated by traditional media companies in 2016, as Patrick suggests could happen, requires us to ignore this constant, ongoing commitment the video site has made to its most successful creators.

It’s clear that YouTube will look different at the end of 2016 than it does now–the site’s personality changes every year–but I’m not ready to call YouTube Rewind a bygone project just yet. Next December, online video stars will still be dancing along to the year’s top memes; it just so happens that some of them will also be rubbing shoulders with Hollywood. Patrick and his fellow creators would be wise to embrace this change wherever they can. YouTube is going to look different in a few months, but that evolution will open up new opportunities for creators big and small, and smart videomakers will be able to take advantage.

Snapchat Returns To Making Original Content For Its Discover Channel

In mid-2015, Snapchat started its own original content division and hired an exec to oversee all programming development. Only a few months later in October, the app, known for deleting messages after a short period of time, shuttered its content division and laid off all that branch’s staff members. Now, however, Snapchat is returning to original content creation, at least for the time being. The ephemeral messaging app (which pulls in four billion video views a day) has launched its own music-centric channel on Snapchat’s Discover platform.

Sponsored exclusively by Spotify, Snapchat’s channel has several new pieces of music-themed content created by an in-house team led by Nick Bell, according to one of AdAge’s sources. The original content first debuted on December 26, 2015, and will run through the start of 2016, with each day focusing on a different genre of music, like hip-hop, electronic dance music (EDM), and R&B. Snapchat plans to publish original articles, artist interviews, videos of live performances, and more media summarizing the best moments in music from 2015.

A spokeswoman for Snapchat declined to clarify whether or not Snapchat will continue to make original content in the future. For now, the messaging app’s in-house team could simply be testing what original content will best resonate with the app’s users and how Snapchat can make a name for itself on its own Discover platform. If Snapchat manages to find success with original content (however that’s defined), the short-term messaging app company could displace one or more of the 18 other brands currently releasing content on Discover, including Vox and Mashable.

You can check out all of Snapchat’s original music content now through the new year by visiting its Discover channel within the iOS or Android app.

Showtime Goes Online To Offer Early Access For ‘Millions,’ ‘Shameless’

A premium cable channel that has embraced the reach of the Internet is up to its usual tricks. On January 1st, Showtime will premiere the season six premiere of Shameless and the first episode of Billions several days before their respective TV air dates of January 10th and January 17th.

The episodes will be available on a number of different platforms. According to Variety, Showtime’s digital distribution network includes YouTube, Facebook, Hulu, Roku, PlayStation Vue, iTunes and its Sho.com website.

By offering early digital access to Shameless and Billions, Showtime is once again returning to a strategy it has utilized since at least 2012. In that time, the practice of early online premieres has become common among distributors of premium programming. HBO has adopted it, and more recently, Netflix jumped on the bandwagon as well, sharing the first episode of its true crime series Making A Murderer on YouTube.

Shameless is a dramedy centered on a working-class family, while Millions is a political drama starring Paul Giamatti. The latter series’ first season will run for 12 episodes.

2015 Edition Of Vlogbrothers’ Project For Awesome Raises $1,546,384

For the fourth year in a row, the YouTube community’s most significant charity drive has improved upon the previous year’s total. The 2015 edition of Project For Awesome, hosted by Vlogbrothers hosts Hank and John Green, raised $1,546,384, which will support charities chosen by online video fans.

The annual Project For Awesome Indiegogo campaign launched on December 9th, with potential donors instructed to time their contributions based on the organization they wished to support. Money collected in the first 84 hours of the campaign went to a pair of charities selected by the Vlogbrothers: Save the Children and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The second part of the fundraising drive, on the other hand, supported organizations championed by YouTube stars and voted on by fans. The Vlogbrothers have not yet announced the charities selected by the YouTube community, though some of the top videos on the Project For Awesome website come from SmarterEveryDay (supporting Not Forgotten), Emma Blackery (supporting Liberty in North Korea), and Rhett & Link (supporting Action Against Hunger).

By surpassing the $1.5 million mark for the first time, this year’s Project For Awesome stands as the Vlogbrothers’ most successful charity effort to date, eclipsing last year’s total of $1,226,382. The Indiegogo campaign accounted for close to half of that total, and the generosity of the YouTube community at large was matched by individual donors like the Vlogbrothers (who contributed $250,000) and Save the Children (which kicked in $350,000).

As per usual, 2015’s Project For Awesome campaign has made for a heartwarming holiday story. Hopefully, the 2016 edition will bring another unbounded display of goodwill and another record-breaking total.

‘Game Of Thrones’ Continues To Be Most-Pirated TV Show Of The Last Several Years

The yearly stats on the most-torrented television shows are in, and unsurprisingly, Game of Thrones tops the list yet again. Copyright and privacy news site TorrentFreak discovered the HBO fantasy series came in as the most-pirated TV show of 2015 with more than 14.4 million illegal downloads.

Game of Thrones has a track record of landing at the top of the most-pirated charts. In 2013, TorrentFreak found the season finale of season three of Game of Thrones was one of the top two most-downloaded shows alongside Breaking Bad. Then in 2014, piracy-tracking firm Excipio discovered HBO’s drama fantasy had claimed more than 48.369 million estimated torrents across the web, while TorrentFreak’s stat for the same year was around 8.1 million illegal downloads. According to TorrentFreak’s number, Game of Thrones pirating more than doubled in 2015.

AMC’s The Walking Dead claimed the #2 most-torrented spot on TorrentFreak’s 2015 chart with about 6.9 million downloads, up more than 2 million from 2014’s 4.8 million illegal downloads. The Walking Dead was also the second most-pirated show in 2014, according to Excipio’s number of 47.6 million torrents. Additionally, CBS’s The Big Bang Theory resumed its third place on the most-pirated chart for 2015, with 4.4 million illegal downloads (the geek-themed comedy series was also 3rd last year on Excipio’s chart with 33.4 million torrents).

“Overall there is no sign that TV-show piracy is declining, on the contrary,” wrote TorrentFreak’s Founder and Editor-in-Chief Ernesto Van der Sar in a company blog post. “The download numbers for the most popular shows continues to rise, sometimes exceeding the number of traditional viewers in the US.”

Check out more of TorrentFreak’s 2015 piracy findings by reading the site’s corresponding blog post.

Digital Riot Is Latest Company Looking To Turn Digital Media Celebrities Into Movie Stars

In 2015, for the second year in a row, digital media celebrities proved they have enough clout to support their own star vehicles. Young, influential creators like Kian Lawley and Nash Grier led feature-length films, and their fans flocked to those films en masse, pushing them to top positions on the various iTunes charts.

As you might imagine, the emergence of these fan-supported movies has led to significant developments on the business side of things, with companies like Supergravity Pictures emerging to support the growing industry. The latest newcomer looking for a piece of the pie is Digital Riot, which will make movies aimed at social media superfans.

Digital Riot is led by Doug Barry, an executive with experience at Turner and Electronic Arts, as well as film producer John Baldecchi, who serves as the nascent company’s CEO. The goal is to team up with both digital media stars and traditional media personalities to create feature films. As has become the norm with these sorts of projects, Digital Riot will focus most of its efforts on video on-demand platforms like Netflix and iTunes, with theatrical release relegated to a lesser priority.

“By combining Silicon Valley efficiency with the best of Hollywood storytelling and talent, we will dramatically change how movies are made, marketed and distributed,” Barry told Variety. A spokesperson added that genres covered by Digital Riot will include “a workplace comedy, urban comedy, high school gender identity dramedy with heart, teen thriller, and a musical.”

Despite that information, Digital Riot still hasn’t revealed details about particular films it plans to produce, nor has it announced any stars it plans to work with.

Oculus Studios Releases LeBron James VR Documentary On Samsung

Oculus Studios has new virtual reality content for sports fans. The VR production company has launched the documentary Striving for Greatness: An Uninterrupted Original, starring NBA star LeBron James, on Samsung Gear VR.

The 12-minute Striving for Greatness documentary follows James during training sessions for his 13th NBA season and provides interviews with the NBA player and his trainers. Developed by Oculus Studios, the documentary was produced by VR company Felix & Paul Studios alongside Uninterrupted, the sports lifestyle multimedia production company and network co-founded by James and Maverick Carter in early 2015. Uninterrupted originally launched portions of the documentary on its Facebook page earlier this year as part of that site’s 360-degree video efforts.

It’s here! Dive head-first into Ep. 1 of Striving for Greatness, an UNINTERRUPTED original series starring LeBron James,…

Posted by UNINTERRUPTED on Thursday, 29 October 2015

 

Virtual reality experiences have started to make an appearance in the online video world over the last year. In January, Vice announced Spike Jonze would direct the media company’s first-ever virtual reality program. Then in July, former Pixar animator Ramiro Lopez Dau created the short film Henry for the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift to experiment with character creation and development in a VR setting. And in the fall, Hulu revealed plans for its own VR app and selection of VR movies.

Samsung Gear VR owners can download Striving for Greatness from the Oculus store or watch the documentary through Samsung’s Milk VR app.