Netflix is continuing its comedy spree with Grillo Vs. Grillo, the first-ever original production by the streaming giant to hail from Italy. Grillo Vs. Grillo is a standup special of sorts starring the Italian comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo, who is the founder of the country’s Five Star Movement — a populist party that has become increasingly influential in Italy, and which grew out of Grillo’s massively popular blog.
Grillo is frequently compared to U.S. President Donald Trump, as he boasts a non-immigrant stance and also supported the Brexit, according to Variety, which was first to report the special’s debut.
Grillo Vs. Grillo will bow globally on Feb. 10. The special was taped during a tour stop in Genoa, and will feature the 68-year-old’s humor-tinged takes on the global economy, environmental issues, technology, and more.
In October 2015, Netflix announced that it was developing its first original Italian series Suburra— a mob-themed corruption drama — though Suburra will premiere this summer after Grillo Vs. Grill, according to Variety. The streaming giant also has an original Korean series in the works titled Love Alarm, and released Marseille, a French crime series, last May. Netflix, which launched in Italy in October 2015, counts roughly 300,000 subscribers in the country, according to Variety.
Standup specials are also becoming increasingly important to the service. Netflix will debut a special from Amy Schumer next month, following reports that it had commissioned two standup specials from Chris Rock for $40 million, as well as three specials from storied comic Dave Chappelle — all of which are set to air this year.
Filed under: Netflix by Geoff Weiss Comments Off on Netflix To Debut ‘Grillo Vs. Grillo’ Comedy Special On Friday, Its First Italian Original
As Super Bowl advertisers vied for attention during the biggest TV broadcast of the year, American consumers went online to re-watch their favorite commercials from the Big Game. YouTube has compiled a list of the ten ads that received the most views on February 5th, and it was perennial advertiser Budweiser that once again turned turned heads, this time by telling the origin story of its founder.
The commercial in question, titled “Born the Hard Way,” spotlights Adolphus Busch, a German-born immigrant who moved to St. Louis as a teenager and became one of the two men behind the Anheuser-Busch company, which counts Budweiser among its brands. The commercial’s perceived pro-immigrant slant has caused it to generate both positive and negative buzz. At the time of this post, six days after “Born the Hard Way” was first uploaded to YouTube, the video has more than 21 million views, 40,000 likes, and 15,000 dislikes. Some of those views, as you might expect, have been of the paid variety, as I found out when the commercial was twice served to me as a pre-roll ad this morning.
“Born the Hard Way” continues a string of Super Bowl success for Budweiser. YouTube has noted the beer brand’s “Puppy Love” spot as the most popular Super Bowl ad of the past decade.
All of the Super Bowl commercials from this year’s game can be found on YouTube’s Adblitz channel, through which viewers can vote for their favorites. Voting will close at midnight on February 10th, at which point the top Adblitz ad of the year will be announced.
Here, via a YouTube blog post, are this top ten Super Bowl ads in terms of Game Day views:
Vox Media, the proprietor of popular websites including The Verge, Recode, and Eater, has named its first-ever COO as the company is poised to focus this year on expanding its online video audiences and native advertising offering — in terms of both video and text. Trei Brundrett, who has been at Vox for more than 10 years and who led the development of Vox’s company-wide publishing platform, Chorus, has just been appointed COO, Bloomberg reports.
Brundrett will report to Vox CEO Jim Bankoff in his new role, and will be succeeded in his former position as chief product officer by Joe Alicata, who was most recently VP of revenue product and operations. Last October, Vox also namedGavin Purcell, who previously served as a producer for The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, its new head of video. The company counts a total of roughly 800 employees.
Bankoff told Bloomberg that more people watch Vox’s videos than read its articles — to the tune of 2.5 billion overall views last year. As for native advertising, this makes the company more likely to create sponsored content that people will see, it says, rather than the spots that run on Google or Facebook, which many marketers fear are being consumed by bots or are being fleetingly viewed.
Also on tap for the company this year is a continued international expansion, as well as its first-ever television show, a series titled Prefabulousabout prefabricated homes that is set to air on A+E. That series is being developed by Vox Entertainment, the company’s video division.
Filed under: Vox Media by Geoff Weiss Comments Off on Vox Hires First-Ever COO To Grow Video Viewership, Native Advertising
Insights is a new weekly series featuring entertainment industry veteran David Bloom. It represents an experiment of sorts in digital-age journalism and audience engagement with a focus on the intersection of entertainment and technology, an area that David has written about and thought about and been part of in various career incarnations for much of the past 25 years. David welcomes your thoughts, perspectives, calumnies, and kudos at david@tubefilter.com, or on Twitter @DavidBloom.
This installment of Insights is brought to you by Beachfront RISE.
For the past few decades, February has been television’s biggest month. On one end is the Super Bowl, far and away the year’s most-watched event. On the other, the Oscars, usually the second-most watched event. In between, we have the Grammys (typically in the Top 5), a bunch of pre-Oscar awards shows, and a raft of gimmicky castings, Very Special Episodes, and event miniseries devised to boost sweeps-month ratings.
In short, this is money time for the TV business. Or not. One of the things to watch in this time of transition is how well this February goes amid all the shifts hitting linear TV.
Let’s start with this weekend’s Super Bowl. It’s the biggest thing on American television, easily the most-watched show each year by an order of magnitude. Except NFL regular-season ratings were down 9% last fall and a set of desultory first-round playoff games did nothing to boost prospects for Super Bowl LI.
The issues blamed for those ratings drops (presidential politics, bad matchups, concerns over head trauma) haven’t gone away, but more than 110 million people are still expected to tune in.
What’s changing rapidly is how they’re tuning in. One in six viewers (16%) and nearly a quarter of Millennials said they expect to watch the game on a streaming device, according to a study commissioned by MGID. Another 2% will use Verizon’s exclusive NFL deal to watch on their smartphones. Only about 7 in 10 viewers expect to watch the game on traditional pay-TV sources, the study indicated.
Already, about three-fourths of U.S. households have an Internet-connected TV of some sort (Apple TV, game console, Roku), up dramatically in just four years, according to The Diffusion Group. Last year’s Super Bowl drew an average TV audience of nearly 112 million, but only 1.4 million watched it through Internet live-streaming on CBS and NFL properties, CBS said. If in fact something like 16% of viewers watch on streaming sources this year, that’ll be a massive shift.
Also of note: this year’s game broadcaster is Fox, which partnered with LiveLike to show virtual-reality highlights of the game in near real time, a first. The highlights will include each quarter’s four most important plays plus other highlights. Viewers will be able to watch the clips from six camera angles.
This year, it looks like that means stunts, from Snickers’ live ad with Adam Driver to Hyundai’s post-game 90-second spot, which will be directed by Hollywood veteran Peter Berg and cut together from footage shot during the game.
“It used to be, ‘We need a Super Bowl spot.’ Then, it was, ‘We need a Super Bowl spot and program,'” Mark DiMassimo, CEO of ad agency DiMassimo Goldstein, told AP. “Now, it’s we need a Super Bowl stunt or event. It needs to be newsworthy, social and surprising — and it needs to be much bigger than 30 seconds.”
That said, the strategy of releasing ads and teasers ahead of the game is significantly down, according to iSpot.TV, which tracks ad spending. The number of advertisers releasing online previews by the Monday before the game was down a quarter, from 28 to 21. The number of ads was down even more, from 59 to 26. And spending around those preview ads is down 24% through Monday, to $5.5 million.
One company that benefitted from both an early release and a gimmick was the web-design site Wix, which debuted teasers of its ad on Facebook Live and YouTube Live on Jan. 17. The teaser starred actors Gal Gadot and Jason Statham, and has been one of this year’s biggest early performers, according to iSpot.
Even the counter-programming is resorting to gimmicks. Over at Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl XIII, they will include both a virtual-reality “pup’s-eye view and branded content tied to the match between adoptable underage canines.” (link:
“If you show a brand to consumers, they’ll remember it maybe half of the time,” said Vince Cacace, CEO of VR ad-tech company Vertebrae. “But if you let them experience something, they’ll remember it 90 percent of the time. The Puppy Bowl had more than 10 million viewers last year, so including VR in this year’s broadcast will be a huge step in continuing to drive VR adoption.”
It’s worth noting that the Puppy Bowl is second behind only Shark Week among Animal Planet’s franchises, so keeping those eyeballs engaged, even through VR and other gimmicks, is high on Discovery Communications’ priorities.
But it’s also worth noting that relying on tricks to goose interest may suggest concern that audiences will tune out otherwise.
Certainly, interest in the game itself (between league stalwart New England, making its seventh appearance, and Atlanta, making only its second, and with little national following) seems oddly muted this year. That’s reflected in a small way with depressed ticket prices, down 18% from the same period last year. We’ll see how it plays out in viewership, but I’ll say now that if the high-flying Atlanta offense gets stifled by New England’s No. 1 defense, all the stunts and gimmicks won’t be enough to head off a drop in viewers.
I’m also skeptical about prospects for this year’s Oscars. Nominations last week were dominated by the musical La La Land, which received 14. It’s an enjoyable and accessible film, a love letter to both Los Angeles and to creators (which Academy voters love to celebrate). The film has grossed $109 million domestically after two months in theaters, excellent for a small film, but no blockbuster.
And thank goodness the Academy voters rediscovered people of color this year. One Best Picture director, three Best Documentary directors and seven of the 20 acting slots are African-American or other people of color. So at least #OscarsSoWhite won’t dog this year’s awards.
But ratings for one big pre-Oscar awards show/predictor, the SAG Awards, were down 31% from 2015 and 16% from last year. It’s hard to know if that was fatigue over awards shows in general, annoyance with winners’ political statements or other factors.
But given that awards shows are, like sports, one of network TV’s remaining few tune-in opportunities, there may be reason for concern, compounded by the small footprint La La Land occupies in the cultural conversation. Viewers who didn’t watch or like La La Land aren’t likely to tune in to root for even smaller and far more somber challengers such as Manchester by the Sea or Moonlight, or possibly even late-charging challenger Hidden Figures.
After last year’s broadcast, which had the lowest ratings in eight years, it’ll be interesting to see what hold the Oscars still have. Meanwhile, I’ll just note a couple of other small tidbits from this week:
The female-centric Oxygen Channel is shifting its focus to true-crime stories. Such stories have long appealed to a certain female-heavy demographic, the equivalent of horror films that can consistently reach a loyal audience. The tighter genre focus may keep Oxygen modestly relevant in the looming cable shakeout.
So, as you spend your February watching some of TV’s biggest shows, keep an eye on the game behind the game. If the big events stop drawing, the networks are really in trouble.
This installment of Insights is brought to you by Beachfront RISE, the premier app building company that houses all of your content in one place for any device, and monetizes it automatically with their built in programmatic video advertising platform.
Filed under: Articles, Industry, Insights, News by David Bloom Comments Off on Insights: TV’s Super Season Kicks Off This Weekend – Will The Industry Score?
Cord cutters, rest assured: with Super Bowl Sunday just around the corner, there are still plenty of ways to catch the big game.
Airing this year on Fox and kicking off at 6:30 pm ET, smart TV users can stream the game via Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, Roku, Xbox One, or on Windows devices simply by downloading the Fox Sports Go app or the NFL app, per Wired. The stream will feature the same exact commercials that appear on the television broadcast. And while both apps normally require a cable log-in, they won’t on Sunday.
Football fans who want to stream the game on their smartphones can do so from the Fox Sports Go app on both Androidand iOs. However, you’ll have to be connected via Wi-Fi — unless you’re a Verizon subscriber. In addition to a standard mobile stream, according to Wired, the Fox Sports Go app will enable viewers to watch from the perspective of any player on the field — as captured by a brand new 360-camera from Intel.
And here’s a nifty little trick for iPhone users, reports The Wall Street Journal. If you say to Siri, “Let’s watch the Super Bowl,” she will automatically tune into the game on the Fox Sports Go app. Meanwhile, those with smartphone-compatible VR devices — including a Google Cardboard headset or a Samsung Gear VR — can also watch highlights from the game that will be uploaded in real time to the Fox Sports VR app.
Finally, laptop fans can watch the New England Patriots take on the Atlanta Falcons — as well as Lady Gaga’s half-time extravaganza — on the Fox Sports Go website.
Filed under: Super Bowl by Geoff Weiss Comments Off on Here’s How To Stream Sunday’s Super Bowl
We receive a ton of tips every day from independent creators, unaffiliated with any major motion picture studios, television networks, new media studios, or other well-funded online video entities. The Indie Spotlight is where we’ll write about and shout out to a select few of them and bring you up to speed on the great (and sometimes not-so-great) attention-grabbing series you probably haven’t heard about until now. Read previous installments here.
For some people, creating makeup videos on YouTube is a form of self-expression. For others, the goal is to inspire others. For Maxine, the protagonist of a new web series called Max Compact, using cosmetic products serves as a trigger through which she can activate clairvoyant powers. In that regard, she’s just a bit different from the typical beauty guru.
Maxine, portrayed by Giullianna Martinez, is depicted as one of several people in the Max Compact world who have picked up bizarre super powers. In her case, the application of a little lipstick allows her to see the future. Over the course of 12 episodes, we get a glimpse into Maxine’s personal life and watch as she learns to control her abilities.
Max Compact, created by Jo-Dean Roark and produced by online video vet Jenni Powell, works because it is both ambitiously plotted and deceptively simple. The series asks viewers to leap into a fantasy setup where Uber drivers can give others the ability to stop time, but it also contains enough small, realistic touches to make Maxine seem like a fairly ordinary vlogger. The resulting setting is a rich one, and the 12 episodes of Max Compact offer only a taste of what the show’s universe has to offer.
OTHER UNDER-THE-RADAR SERIES TO CHECK OUT
Made in China. This sketch comedy pilot focuses on the stories of Asian immigrants in America.
Rachel Unraveled. This musical comedy satirizes the trope of young actresses who try to make it in the big city.
(un)balanced. A woman struggles to live a new-age, meditative life.
Got a series you’d like to see featured in the Indie Spotlight? Be sure to contact us here. For best coverage, please include a full episode in your e-mail.
Filed under: Articles, Featured, Indie Spotlight, News by Sam Gutelle Comments Off on Indie Spotlight: ‘Max Compact’ Blends Sci-Fi With YouTube Makeup Tutorials
Each year, the Super Bowl halftime show gives tens of millions of viewers a chance to enjoy an over-the-top musical spectacle. In recent years, as you might expect, Super Bowl performers have seen bumps in YouTube viewership after taking the Big Game stage. In particular, it is the guest acts supporting each headliner whose respective view counts have risen most dramatically.
The information about digital viewership for Super Bowl performers comes from YouTube itself and was shared by Billboard. In three out of the last four years, a guest act has seen a bigger post-game bump than the headliner from the same year. In 2013, the big winner was Destiny’s Child; in 2014, Red Hot Chili Peppers; and in 2015, Lenny Kravitz.
There is, of course, a simple explanation for this phenomenon. All of this increases are listed by percentages, and the performers who have been off the Top 40 charts for several years enter the Super Bowl with a lower baseline audience than the major stars who grab the headlines. Therefore, if performers in both these categories see the same volume of new viewership, it is a sharper increase for the less popular one.
Still, the Super Bowl’s ability to shine light on an artists who has been out of the mainstream for a while should not be ignored. For evidence, look at Missy Elliott, who earned many new fans after supporting Katy Perry’s 2015 performance.
2017’s Super Bowl halftime headliner, Lady Gaga, hasn’t confirmed any guests who will join her on stage, but whoever those musicians end up being, look for their YouTube viewership to spike. Gaga, as the numbers indicate, will assuredly have a mini-renaissance of her own.
Filed under: Articles, Featured, News, Super Bowl by Sam Gutelle Comments Off on On YouTube, Super Bowl Performers — Especially The Supporting Acts — See A Bump
During Super Bowl LI, Snickers is breaking new ground by airing the first-ever live commercial in Big Game history, but the candy brand’s innovation in the world of live video goes beyond a single spot. It is also gathering hype for its forthcoming ad with a 36-hour Facebook Live broadcast that began at noon on the Thursday before the Super Bowl.
The broadcast, which went live on the Snickers Facebook page, features a western theme that matches the tenor of the brand’s live Super Bowl ad. When I tuned in on Friday, February 3rd, a “19th-century doctor” was answering medical questions posed to him by viewers. Several special guests made appearances throughout the duration of the stream. At one point, YouTube star Tyler Oakley and NFL star A.J. Green teamed up for some juggling shenanigans.
The live Super Bowl ad will feature Adam Driver, the actor known for his villainous turn as Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The campaign was born out of a partnership between Mars, which owns Snickers, and ad agency BBDO. “Every year we challenge ourselves to find new ways to satisfy our fans hunger for entertainment by delivering something new and breakthrough, and there is no better way than being the first to have a Super Bowl live ad,” said Snickers brand director Allison Miazga-Bedrick when the live ad was first announced.
In recent years, ads that have attracted attention online in the days leading up to the Super Bowl have tended to rank among the Big Game’s most popular spots. Snickers has clearly taken that philosophy to heart, and once all the ads have been revealed, we’ll be able to see how 36 hours of entertainment translates to viewer engagement.
Filed under: Articles, Featured, News, Super Bowl by Sam Gutelle Comments Off on Snickers Counts Down To Its Live Super Bowl Ad With Facebook Live Stream
AwesomenessTV has signed eight influencers to its talent division, the ATV Network, Tubefilter has exclusively learned, including Keke Palmer — a noted actress and singer who currently stars in the hit Fox series Scream Queens. Palmer, who counts 4.7 million Instagram followers and 5.8 million Facebook fans, just released a memoir titled I Don’t Belong To You.
Additionally, 20-year-old Luke Korns has joined the AwesomenessTV family. Korns is a comedic vlogger and aspiring filmmaker who counts roughly 1 million YouTube subscribers.
AwesomenessTV has also signed: 17-year-old Musical.ly star Kristen Hancher, who counts a gobstopping 13 million followers on the lip-synching platform; musician and model Sammy Wilk, who rose to fame on now-defunct Vine but is parlaying his success to YouTube; singer-actor Collin Vogt; and Alex DelloStritto, a 15-year-old girl from Pennsylvania who rocketed to viral fame with a single tweet in which she confessed to inadvertently spending $733 dollars at Sephora using her mother’s credit card.
Finally, Awesomeness is bringing two duos on board: the 18-year-old Berry Twins, who post thought-provoking videos and are planning careers in either fashion or film, and Kam Dabrowski and Erik Fellows — two actors who have appeared on shows like Law And Order: SVU and Amazon’s The Bay, and whose collab channel consists of funny series and shorts.
All told, AwesomenessTV said, its latest signings will bring roughly 1.6 million new subscribers to the ATV Network, which manages creators’ social channels and also casts for the company’s growing portfolio of series and films.
Filed under: AwesomenessTV by Geoff Weiss Comments Off on AwesomenessTV Signs Singer-Actress Keke Palmer, Vlogger Luke Korns, Others (Exclusive)
Last month, YouTubeupdated its iOS app thumbnails with red progress bars on previously-watched videos in order to make follow-up viewing a cinch. Now, as first spotted by Mashable, the company may be piloting thumbnails that move like GIFs on its desktop site whenever users hover over them with a mouse.
Mashable noticed the GIF thumbnails in the ‘Up Next’ column of videos suggested by YouTube’s algorithms, located to the right of the video that a user is watching. The feature is reportedly only available to select users as of now, and it remains to be seen whether it will roll out wide. (Vimeo, for its part, began testing animated thumbnails in its Staff Picks section all the way back in 2014 — though it was an experiment that doesn’t appear to have stuck).
In a statement, YouTube neither confirmed nor denied the tests, telling Mashable, “With more videos coming to YouTube every minute, we’re always experimenting with ways to help people more easily find, watch, and share the videos that matter most to them. We’ll consider rolling features out more broadly based on feedback on these experiments.”
In addition to the prospective desktop updates, YouTube is also reportedly developing new features for its apps, including a polling feature for live broadcasts, a so-called ‘AutoOffline’ feature, and picture-in-picture support for YouTube on Android TV.
Filed under: YouTube by Geoff Weiss Comments Off on YouTube Reportedly Piloting Thumbnails That Play Like GIFs On Desktop Site
It has been more than a year since ESPN shuttered the majority of its owned-and-operated YouTube channels after opting out of the then-new YouTube Red service, but now, The Worldwide Leader In Sports has returned to the world’s top video site. On the first day of February, ESPN began uploading videos to its primary YouTube channel, thus signaling a shift in the two companies’ relationship.
As part of the process through which it launched YouTube Red, YouTube had to renegotiate deals with media companies in order to account for the viewers who would soon be watching ad-free. Disney, which owns ESPN, came to terms with YouTube, but the sports network was not part of the agreement. As a result, it closed down the majority of its YouTube channels.
At the time, the consensus was that ESPN was restricted by its contracts with sports leagues and other rights-related issues, but now that it is back on YouTube, an amenable solution has apparently been found. “We were able to come to terms on a short form video agreement for YouTube and YouTube Red as part of our larger deal with The Walt Disney Company,” an ESPN spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal.
In the first two days after that deal went into effect, 29 new videos arrived on the ESPN YouTube channel, including clips from shows like SportsCenter and First Take. At that rate, ESPN figures to become a prolific media company on the world’s top video site, as has been the case for many of the leagues it broadcasts and covers.
Filed under: Articles, ESPN, Featured, News by Sam Gutelle Comments Off on ESPN Comes To Terms With YouTube, Begins Uploading Videos Again
In a form filed yesterday for Snap Inc.’s initial public offering, which could value the ephemeral messaging company at as much as $25 billion, the company revealed future plans for its Spectacles product — a pair of video-capturing smart sunglasses that can share content via the Snapchat app.
In 2017, the company wrote, “we plan to significantly broaden the distribution of Spectacles.” This is telling given that the Spectacles launch almost seemed like a stunt of sorts last November — when interactive vending machines started appearing in various tourist-heavy locales across the country, selling the devices for $130 a pop.
Beyond these so-called Snapbots, there’s been no other way for consumers at large to get their hands on the devices — though that’s seemingly about to change. Nevertheless, Spectacles were immaterial to Snap’s earnings in 2016, the company said, and it doesn’t expect for them to be profitable anytime soon given that “production and operating costs related to Spectacles…will exceed the related revenue in the near future,” according to the filing.
Business Insider also surmises that Spectacles could eventually gain additional capabilities. Given the company’s uber-popular lenses, which enable users to alter their selfies and surroundings, Spectacles could eventually come to serve as a way for users to consume augmented reality, according to the outlet. In this vein, Snapchat reportedly acquired the Israeli augmented reality startup Cimagine— which lets consumers visualize products that they might want to purchase — last month for $35 million.
Filed under: Snapchat by Geoff Weiss Comments Off on Snapchat Plans To “Significantly Broaden The Distribution Of Spectacles” In 2017
