He also, as you’ll learn below, used to own a Sony Watchman.

1. What’s the one big issue/law/attitude/restriction that you think is holding back the industry?

Maybe oldteevee. They’re just so big and flat and awesome these days.

From an ad dollars perspective though, I’d say it is a need for better online video measurement. We have plenty of data in our industry demonstrating our show demographics, the large number of people watching and how rapidly that number is growing. But the real benefit of online video for brands is that online video is a visceral and trusted form of social media — and to that end the huge impact of online video can be tougher to measure. We are in the process of doing research to show that aligning with a successful video series affects behavior and perceptions in a way traditional media often can’t. It’s similar to evolutions in other media like newspapers, radio and TV. Our audience size is as big or bigger than a lot of cable TV shows, so we need to prove that because the right approach to online video can be more engaging and targeted, it’s a more efficient place to put advertising dollars.

2. What industry buzzword do you never want to hear again?

I can’t say “engaging” since I just used it one sentence ago, so I’d go with “viral.” Admittedly for a long time that was how I described what I did because I started in online video by creating the Obama Girl videos which I think did fit the word “viral.”

But people have come to use “viral video” and “online video” interchangeably, despite the fact that a very small percentage of online video viewership comes through “viral” sharing. Sustainable online video shows today are built most often through very loyal viewers who opt in for specific video series and then make watching those shows a part of their daily routine.

When Barely Political was acquired by Next New Networks I was excited about the opportunity because like them I wanted to build networks with episodic content and a regular audience, and not rely on “viral” hits. We all recognized quickly that the majority of viewership comes from search, subscribers and having consistent content. But at every industry event there is still a panel dedicated to the “secrets of viral video.” The “secret” about viral video is that it’s too risky. I believe brands are almost always better off aligning with a video series that already has an established audience.

3. If someone gave you $50 million to invest in a company in this space, which one would it be?

Someone needs to bring back the Sony Watchman experience already, and I’d invest in the company that makes that happen. I had a Watchman in 3rd grade in 1985 and I loved it. Portable live TV is great. I’d like to think that 25 years later we’d be at a point where all these Droids and iPhones could serve up live television a little more quickly than they do now. If not I’d like my Sony Watchman to work again.

4. What was the last video you didn’t make yourself that you liked enough to spread to others?

I sent that video Single Ladies Devastation to a bunch of people this week. I had a similar thing happen to me recently when my son was running around pretending he was an animal and I tried to joke with him “No, you’re not a Zee-bra, Ethan!” And he burst into tears. So I empathized with that dad, and loved the video.

5. WILDCARD QUESTION: Do you think that the Barely Political/Barely Digital concept has an expiration date where it simply isn’t funny anymore — where you’ve told all the jokes there are to tell? If so, what is it, and what will you do then? If not, how will you keep it fresh?

Fortunately I think there are always more jokes to be told. But over the past three years our comedy networks have definitely expanded in an effort to keep fresh. For a long time we put out solely political comedy. Then last year we started Barely Digital, which now draws more viewership than Barely Political. Today our audience is driven largely by our music parody series called The Key of Awesome which has captured over 50 million views since kicking off in October 2009. Keeping our rotation of shows fresh is essential and I think will avoid our having an expiration date. March 2010 was our biggest month to date in terms of audience, with over 30 million views on our Barely Political and Barely Digital networks.

If I’m wrong and we do run out of things to joke about, I am going to be a social media expert expert, where I am an expert about social media experts and help companies figure out which experts have the most expertise.

Do you have a question for Ben Relles? Go ahead and ask it in the comments — if it’s not stupid (or heck, maybe even if it is) he’ll answer it in the next few days!

The one-day head start that online Aussie fans are getting probably won’t do much in the way of preventing piracy, as episodes will premiere in Australia two weeks after the UK (in the United States, BBC America will be on a similar schedule). It’s a much improved delay, though, from the past, when fans outside Britain would wait for months after the UK premiere for their fix — or learn how to use torrents.

But fighting piracy, or creating a buzz for the show, doesn’t seem to be the goal here: as opposed to Warner Bros and ITV’s decision to release episodes of The Vampire Diaries ahead of their British airing, it appears that the purpose of debuting Doctor Who online early is to get Australians using the free video service.

According to Kim Dalton, director of Television at the ABC, “iView is a fantastic offering, an additional way for Australian audiences to watch ABC TV’s content — generally after, but in this special case before, its television broadcast. We hope the lure of Doctor Who — and what a fun and exciting lure it is — will provide incentive for more viewers to discover iView, and experience how convenient and easy to use it is.”

iView first became available in July 2008, and is available on the PS3 through the Playstation Network. So, hey, f you’re reading this and you’re in Australia, we’d love to find out whether you’ve used the iView service, and what you think of it, in the comments!

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Beginning April 23, those who purchase a Virtual Premium pass will get “full backstage access” to the festival goings-on, which means being able to watch eight or more of the feature films premiering at the festival and red carpet coverage, and to participate in live Q&As with the filmmakers (according to a representative for the fest, these chats will be text-based).

The Virtual Premium pass costs $45 — which isn’t too bad, given that you get to watch yet-to-premiere films like Edward Burns’s Nice Guy Johnny or opening night selection Shrek Forever After. The pass is not available to international audiences, though, and the red carpet live-streaming will be available to the general public, not just pass holders.

However, full passes to the physical fest cost $250-$450 (though you can buy tickets for individual films separately). That extra $200 might be worth the chance to touch Shrek star Cameron Diaz in person — something the Internet can’t currently replicate. But you’ll also probably have to get out of your pajamas.

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Photo by The Bui Bros. (thebuibrothers.com)

Ah, the Sci-Fi Channel original movie. Even the channel’s recent name change to SyFy can’t keep Saturday nights from being must-see TV for B-movie fans who like their snakes mega-sized and their spiders on ice.

A pretty wide range of actors have done their time fighting CGI-rendered monsters, and today the Internet’s own Felicia Day joins their ranks, taking the lead role in the Little Red Riding Hood-inspired Red, which is due to premiere in 2011. (She’s a werewolf hunter!)

Being famous on the Internet doesn’t necessarily translate to offline success, but Day is the rare star who might just pull it off — at least, by SyFy’s standards. Why? Let’s look at the numbers.

First, what does SyFy consider to be a success? Well, their last major ratings hit for an original film was the premiere of Megafault in October 2009, which starred the late Brittany Murphy and was watched by 2.6 million people.

2.6 million people is a lot — but right now, Day has nearly 1.75 million Twitter followers, a number that keeps climbing, as seen in this chart from the last three months:

And that audience can be mobilized. According to Microsoft, the first two seasons of The Guild have reached nearly six million downloads, making it one of the most popular shows ever on Xbox LIVE.
In addition, every episode of the show’s first season, as hosted on YouTube, has topped one million views, and her first appearance on Atom.com’s Legend of Neil pushed the show to almost 420,000 views (the site in general has less viewership than YouTube, but most other episodes of the series received about half as many views).

And here’s the big one, of course: the Guild Season 3-promoting Do You Wanna Date My Avatar music video, which with 8.5 million views is the most-viewed video on The Guild‘s YouTube channel. If just one third of the people who watched Date My Avatar tune in for the premiere of Red next year, then that would mean 2.8 million views.

There’s no way to be sure how many Twitter followers Day will have in a year’s time, but 1.7 million is nothing to scoff at, and that number is likely to climb. If just half of that number were to tune into SyFy when they normally wouldn’t, that’d still mean an impressive bump in the network’s typical Saturday night viewership.

All of this is conjecture, though, and the challenge is getting people away from their computers and in front of their TVs. Network shows featuring Day as a guest actress haven’t benefited much in the ratings department from her guest spots: Her September 2008 House appearance did 12.3 million, while her December 2009 Lie to Me episode did 6.59 million — both numbers being relatively standard for those shows.

But neither of those shows seriously promoted Day or really capitalized on her online fame — meanwhile, SyFy makes prominent mention of her web series work in the Red press release. Personally, I think that’s a good sign, and who knows? By 2011, TV and web content might be well-integrated enough that we’ll see TV commercials for Red plugging its star as “Dr. Horrible‘s Felicia Day.”

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ABC and Cablevision had been embroiled in a very public dispute over the right to carry New York’s WABC-7 on the cable’s pay TV service. ABC had threatened to cut off Cablevision if the cable company didn’t agree to pay substantially higher retransmission fees; the network followed through in the wee hours of Sunday, and Cablevision’s New York-based customers were facing the very real possibility of missing Hollywood’s most prestigious awards show.

In fact, 3.1 million of the cable company’s customers did miss the first 14 minutes of the Oscars. WABC-7 returned to Cablevision at 8.44pm EST, and a news ticker scrolling through the bottom of the screen proclaimed that “ABC7 and Cablevision have made significant progress in negotiations and are pleased to announce that ABC7′s signal has returned to Cablevision customers as they try to finalize a deal,” according to a New York Daily News report.

It’s still unclear how this final deal will look like, and there seems to be a very real chance that it could still fall through. ABC initially asked for one dollar per subscriber, and Cablevision’s initial counter-offer hasn’t been made public, but it’s said to have been much lower.

Conflicts like this one have become fairly common as broadcasters are trying to find new sources of revenue. Time Warner Cable squabbled with Fox during the recent holiday season, and earlier this year Scripps Network pulled its HGTV and Food Network channels off Cablevision for three weeks to press for higher fees.

But during any of those negotiations, high-profile broadcasters like ABC hadn’t taken any real chances to actually cause black-outs of their programming. The 2010 Academy Awards may just mark the day the gloves came off between broadcasters and cable providers.

New Yorkers had a few options for their Oscar night even if no deal was reached. ABC offered a live stream from the red carpet on Oscar.com, and Cablevision offered its VOD titles for free to its cable subscribers.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Davidlohr Bueso.

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The five-week Best in Show campaign pairs up TV show contenders in eight different genres for a series of eliminations, which will lead to the declaration of an Ultimate Champion on April 5. Bud Light, which has sponsored the event, gets prominent brand placement, and Entertainment Weekly‘s Ken Tucker is weighing in on the 16 picks (which are accompanied by off-site links to EW.com content).

What do the winning shows get? No clue. Is this anything but a popularity contest? Nope. Is it a quick and fun way to kill five minutes of your Friday afternoon? Darn tootin.’

I did my first-round bracket just now, and there are definitely some tight match-ups — Chuck and Dollhouse are tied at 50 percent each. Personally, I’m not looking forward to round 2, when I’ll be forced to pick between current frontrunners 30 Rock and The Office.

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Julia Allison, Meghan Asha and Mary Ramblin. Photo from the TMI Weekly blog.

It’s a quiet afternoon when my phone rings with an unknown number. I don’t get a lot of phone calls from unknown numbers, especially from people who have been the focus of both the New York Times and fierce reblogging sites, so it’s a bit surprising to discover that Julia Allison is on the line.

Allison was calling me because about half an hour earlier, I had emailed her about TMI Weekly, the show she co-hosted and produced for Next New Networks starting in the fall of 2008 — and I had used the word “cancellation” in doing so. So, before getting down to my real questions about the current state of the show, whose one-year contract was not renewed due to a mutual decision between the TMI team and NNN, we went back and forth briefly over whether or not the word is applicable.

The debate over using “the C word” didn’t surprise me. It’s not a pretty word, cancellation, so it’s not surprising that we tend to avoid it. In fact, as a community in general, we talk a lot more about the shows that are beginning than we do about the shows that are about to end. Which makes sense — for one thing, a lot of shows (especially scripted ones) have limited resources, and season finales are all-too-often series finales. For another, many creators and companies who are in the business of creating ongoing brands are still figuring out what this medium is capable of, and are constantly reinventing themselves and their projects.

Ryan Vance, Vice President of Programming and Production of Revision3, doesn’t like the word cancellation. “We don’t use it,” he said via phone, “though I’m not sure why.” He tries to exercise patience with the network’s programming, though a decision to end a show depends on how many resources it uses. “The more money you’re spending, the more pressure there is to do well right away.” According to him, however, most shows have a slow and steady rise, and so low-cost programming has a better chance of finding its audience.

One interesting element of Rev3′s philosophy is that even after they end production on a show, they keep those produced episodes online — in part because there’s an audience for the content, and also because they’re able to sell advertising on it. “It’s not a ton of money — our bread and butter is integrated advertising — but if someone wants to watch it, we can make a little money from it,” Vance said.

DECA CEO Michael Wayne, meanwhile, takes a different approach, as DECA removes its shows from the Internet following their cancellation. The reason for that, though, is the same reason they also don’t use the word “cancel”: for DECA, according to Wayne, a show isn’t just a show — it’s a brand and a standalone business.

So in considering whether or not to continue making a show like the now-defunct Bush League TV, “We look at it as: ‘Is this business heading into profitability or not?’” If it isn’t, they shut it down. “When you shut down a brand and you don’t take it offline, it can look bad, and that inevitably doesn’t reflect well on the company,” he said.

Of course, DECA’s focus has also changed dramatically over the last few years, as they’ve started almost exclusively targeting women over 25 with shows like Momversation and Good Bite, which partner nicely with brands. They only got to that place, though, after experiments like Bush League. “At the end of the day, you have to take risks, and you’re never going to be successful 100 percent of the time,” Wayne said.

For NNN, the philosophy is that “You put it up there, it works, you keep doing it. It doesn’t work, you don’t keep doing it,” according to VP of Programming Kathleen Grace. (Next New, like Rev3, keeps now-concluded series online as well.) But their philosophy also makes room for strong talent relationships. Just one recent example: Key of Awesome creator Mark Douglas created two or three other “cancelled” shows before finding success with his new parody series, and February was the best month yet for NNN’s traffic. The top video for the month was a Ke$ha parody created by him.

Meanwhile, NNN’s The Reel Good Show, featuring Jimmy Fallon nemesis Bobby Miller, ended last week — Miller, an established member of the Indy Mogul talent pool, is now promoting his short film Tub, which premiered at Sundance and will also be shown at the Slamdance Film Fest. And TMI co-host Mary Rambin, following the end of the series, is currently starring in the NNN series Life Experiment.

“When you’re a media company, you always have shows that come and go,” Next New co-founder Tim Shey remarked via phone when we initially talked about TMI‘s end back in December. “But it’s a very forgiving medium. You don’t have to think about cancellation in way TV does.” The catch of this is that these decisions are made quietly; currently there is nothing on TMIWeekly.com to indicate that the show is no longer in production, a situation not uncommon to most other shows. This has the benefit of allowing the show, on the surface, to still look active and interesting to new viewers. But I imagine that anyone who might actually have been following the show would have appreciated a farewell message of some sort.

If I were a producer of web video, I’d get two words tattooed on my body: adaptable and sustainable. So many shows have a short shelf life, but that’s no way to build and keep an audience — it’s the people who are in things for the long haul who, you know, stick around that long. However, it’s important to not be afraid of the “C word,” whether it stand for change or closure.

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Three TiVo Premiere Mysteries; a few images in the company’s press kit might reveal some interesting new features that have yet to be explained. (Zatz Not Funny)

ITV Devalues Its Online Business, Admits It’s Underperforming; the UK broadcaster placed a £30 million ($45 million) value on its online operations last year, significantly less than the £68 million it said they were worth just a year earlier. (paidContent:UK)

Sky Player Gets More Live TV; the online TV service provided by BSkyB continues to expand its content by adding three more new channels, bringing the total to 30. (Tech Watch)

Aflexi Launches CDN FlexiMart; CDN software management company launched the new Aflexi FlexiMart platform, enabling web hosts to share infrastructure and buy, sell and trade capacity in real time. (press release)

Blackwave Launches Video Delivery Platform; the Internet video storage and delivery infrastructure company announced a new video delivery system based on its enterprise-class Chorus software. (press release)

Univision Launches Video App for BlackBerry Users; the application will be the first to give BlackBerry users access to Univision’s TV programs. (press release)

ABC has given Cablevision until midnight on March 7 to negotiate a retrans agreement or risk losing its broadcast programming, which includes popular TV shows like Lost, Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, as well as live events like this weekend’s Academy Awards broadcast.

Both sides have set up web sites and plan to launch TV, radio and print ads to help “educate” consumers about where they stand on the issues — namely, who gets paid and how much. On its web site, www.saveabc7.com, ABC complains that Cablevision charges consumers $18 for its basic broadcast tier of TV stations, but then doesn’t pass any of that money on to the broadcaster. Meanwhile, Cablevision says Disney is seeking $40 million to continue airing its ABC broadcasts to cable subscribers, which it equates to a 20 percent “tax” on top of the $200 million it already pays for Disney programming.

But this fight is unlikely to result in subscribers’ screens going blank. As we saw with the standoff between Time Warner Cable and Fox earlier this year, and Time Warner Cable and Viacom the year before, such brinksmanship usually ends with an 11th-hour deal, or at worst an extension of the negotiations without a blackout until a deal can be reached. That said, Cablevision has held fast against programmers in the past, most recently against Scripps Networks, which pulled the Food Network and HGTV off its New York cable system for three weeks earlier this year.

But unlike Scripps, ABC’s broadcast signals are available for free over the air — and much of its most popular scripted programming is available on demand on Hulu and ABC.com. While the online component won’t help Cablevision subscribers that want to watch Lost as it airs (ABC’s programs are generally available the day after a show airs in broadcast), and certainly won’t help those that want to watch the Oscars, it could serve as a leveraging chip for Cablevision, which might argue that making broadcast programming available on demand online is cutting into broadcast TV viewing.

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