GigaOM » Entertainment

Catching up with The Burg: Is There Hope for Hipsters?

Jackson West — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:30:05 +0000

A little over two years since NewTeeVee came online, we’re catching up with some veterans who’ve been working with the medium since before Google paid off YouTube’s VCs, Hulu was just a glint in News Corp. and NBC Universal’s eye and Apple hadn’t taken up their set-top box hobby. This is the second in a series by one of the original NewTeeVee writers, Jackson West. See also part 1: Chuck Olsen.

Hipsters in bread lines — that’s what it’s come to in “Depression,” the very special Christmas episode of The Burg, the long-running web series produced by Dinosaur Diorama’s Kathleen Grace and Thom Woodley devoted to lovingly mocking the foibles of the young and hip in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The All-For-Nots (the faux Billyburg band featured in another eponymous production from Grace and Woodley) even pop in to spread some holiday cheer and drop some final product placement mentions. But it’s not all faux: When Paul (woodley) mentions Vuguru founder Micahel Eisner, Courtney (Kelli Giddish) asks, “Wait, you guys actually make money doing this?” And as unbelievable as it sounds, the answer is yes.

However, it’ll be a while before Grace and Woodley — or anyone on the show’s cast or crew — are in danger of becoming trustafarians. Street cred may have paid off, but it’s still no way to fund a 401k.

Woodley and Grace started The Burg as a way to “build our reel, have some fun and hopefully, get noticed” they wrote in a response to my emailed questions. That they did, signing a deal with Eisner’s Vuguru to produce The All-For-Nots and signing on sponsors like Dodge, Expedia and Bebo. It’s since been one of the few independently produced shows to make it onto Hulu. While it gained a wider audience than The Burg (which wrangled its own deal with Motorla for product placement through VideoEgg), that doesn’t mean it was a ticket to fame and fortune, necessarily.

“Unfortunately, the emphasis on ‘millions of views no matter who the audience is’ will always put celebrity content and lowest common denominator over independent producers making smart content,” they explained. While optimistic that the Web provides a new way to tell stories and reach niche audiences, until sponsors and distributors come around, they admit it will be a struggle for independent productions looking to serve small but loyal audiences.

For instance, they felt The Burg was a bigger hit than The All-For-Nots, despite having fewer total views, because “our fans are very devoted and excited by the show.” Noting that they felt less in tune with the The All-For-Nots fans, they wished the series itself had received more critical attention, as opposed to the business model behind it. “It’s not so much about credit or awards, but a dialogue and feedback from the audience and the community.”

While they’d love to “make it big,” Woodley and Grace were clear that exploring a medium they see as distinct from mass media is still creatively rewarding for its own sake. They say that while seeing talent jump from the embedded player to the television (or even the big screen) serves to legitimize people working online, web entertainment is ultimately a different animal. “It’s social, interactive storytelling, instantaneous and customizable in a way that mass media can never be,” they wrote.

As for advice to other creators gleaned from their experience: “Make it faster, cheaper, and more interactive. Have more fun.” But while they feel they’ll be able to make a living as independent, online producers “soon” and promise something new this spring, that doesn’t mean they’ve quit their day jobs. That would probably be a recipe for nights of stone soup with stewed shoe leather.

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Cisco: Professional Content, Not YouTube, Leads U.S. Online Video Boom

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:29:38 +0000

YouTube has almost become a synonym for online video in recent years, but professional online video platforms like Hulu.com are dominating YouTube’s dancing babies, according to a new Cisco study. The company just announced the results of its Visual Networking Index Survey (PDF), which compared TV and online viewing habits in the U.S., China, Germany and Sweden. The survey finds that U.S. Internet users spend 2.5 times longer watching professional content as user-generated video clips on their PCs.

Video viewing devices used by U.S. Internet users. Chart courtesy of Cisco.

These results should be music to the ears of Hulu’s management, but the survey also shows that content owners have to play catchup when it comes to licensing their catalogs for overseas audiences. Germans spend twice as much time on their PCs and laptops viewing user-generated videos as opposed to professional content, most likely because there just is no Hulu.de yet. However, Cisco and other devices makers still have some work left to do, as well: Many Internet users around the world don’t seem to be too excited about the prospect of online video on their TVs.

The Cisco study is based on a survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future at the USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, which surveyed about 1,000 users in each of the four countries. The study isn’t too specific when it comes to the distinction between user-generated and professional content, but a Cisco spokesperson told us that “professional” encompasses studio-produced shows and movies, as distinct from consumer-produced videos.

This is the first time Annenberg and Cisco have done this survey, but it’s probably safe to assume that user-generated content would have been far more prominent in the years before Hulu. Also, professional content may be taking up more of the users’ time may simply because TV shows and movies tend to be much longer than your average YouTube video.

The study also covers the devices used to watch video and television programming, which again showed significant differences between the U.S. and the rest of the world. 42 percent of U.S. respondents own a DVR, whereas only 11 percent of all Germans surveyed time-shift TV watching in their living room.

The U.S. is also a front-runner when it comes to mobile video. About 23 percent declared that they watch video on their mobile phones, while only 8-12 percent do so in Sweden, China and Germany. Watching videos on iPods and other non-phone devices is also most popular in the U.S., but at 8 percent, far less prominent than one might think.

So, overall, where is online video most popular? No, it’s not the U.S., despite Hulu. It’s China. Chinese Internet users spend almost two hours per day watching video on their PCs, compared with 1.8 hours per day in front of their TVs. U.S. (and German) users watch 1.5 hours of online video per day — far less than the 3.8 hours of traditional TV time U.S. respondents enjoy daily. This makes Chinese Internet users the only ones that actually watch more video on their PCs that on the TV — and they don’t seem to be bothered about this at all.

“When asked if they would be interested in watching video found on the Internet on their television set, most seemed apathetic, or perhaps they did not understand the question,”‘ the report notes somewhat condescendingly. Perhaps they just didn’t understand why anyone would ask them such a silly question.

Americans, on the other hand, love their big, flat-screen TVs. However, the interest in getting online content on that screen seemed somewhat muted, even stateside. The majority of users where up for the idea, the report notes without providing specific details, but “relatively large numbers (…) neither agreed or disagreed, suggesting that maybe they are unaware of the possibility.” I guess all those companies presenting new, Internet-enabled set-top-boxes at CES these days still have some convincing to do.

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Whatever Happened To P2P Set-Top Boxes?

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:00:08 +0000

2008 was supposed to be the year when Internet video finally reached the living room, thanks to a whole bunch of set-top boxes. Part of that mix was supposed to be P2P, either in the form of distributed streaming, or good old BitTorrent downloads. Well, guess what: It hasn’t really happened — at least not on a large scale. Most of us still watch YouTube and Hulu on our laptops, and file-sharing continues to be almost exclusively PC-based.

So whatever happened to all those P2P set-top boxes that were supposed to revolutionize not only how we watch video, but also how those bits reach our living room? With the year coming to a close, we decided to check back, report about progress (and failures) and give an outlook for the fate of these boxes in 2009.

Here are five P2P set top boxes that made headlines in 2008:

Myka was the big P2P-device story of the spring. It promised licensed content from major studios as well as BitTorrent in a nice box that looked a little like an over-sized Apple TV, and it got enthusiastic coverage from Wired.com, Gizmodo, Engadget and others. It’s web site however hasn’t been updated since spring and is still taking pre-orders for a supposed release in the summer of ’08. Its forum has been taken over by spammers, and one former affiliate partner complained to us that he hasn’t seen any money nor heard from the company since April. We tried to get in touch with Myka, but didn’t receive any reply — enough reasons to call this vaporware.

Vudu is definitely not vaporware, but the company has faced its own set of obstacles this year. Vudu offers its customers progressive, P2P-powered downloads of 1,100 HD movies for $4 a pop. It’s been struggling to get a bigger audience for its box despite price cuts, and it went through a round of layoffs and the departure of its CEO. On the plus side, it did just introduce a new high-end device. TheVudu XL 2 features “aerospace-grade aluminum bezel,” is available only through home-theater installers and comes with a hefty price tag of $1,299. That seems to be just the right business model for a recession…

China-based Vatata promises to bring its own streaming P2P video platform Vakaka as well as popular file-sharing protocols like BitTorrent to the living room. The company doesn’t actually produce it’s own set top boxes, but it licenses its platform to hardware makers. We covered the company earlier this year when it had just struck three such licensing agreements.Vatata’s CEO Jian Song told us that these devices have now reached the shelves of retailers in China, but customers have only bought around 10,000 of them so far. The company is looking for a partner in the U.S. right now and is actively working on the next generation of its platform, which will also feature Hulu playback, according to Song. This one could get interesting — if it ever actually makes its way to U.S. retailers.

Boxee also doesn’t have its own box, but instead runs amongst other things on Apple TVs, offering Apple users not only the chance to download torrents straight to their living room thanks to a built-in BitTorrent client, but also to use other people’s guilty torrent pleasures as a recommendation engine for Hulu streams and other legitimate content sources. That’s pretty clever, but the whole setup has one downside: Apple tightly controls its own platform, as evident by the latest Apple TV update that broke Boxee. Granted, the Boxee community came up with a fix in no time, but Boxee will remain a niche product if it depends on its users capability to jailbreak their set-top box after every new update.

NextshareTV is a set-top box developed by Pioneer and P2P Next, a European research project backed by a couple million Euros of EU funding that aims to figure out better P2P streaming solutions. Pioneer has apparently produced a working prototype of this box for an extensive field test of the technology. Don’t expect these boxes to reach the shelves in 2009 though: The P2P Next project is scheduled to run for four years, and it’s unlikely that content partners like the BBC will allow anything to reach the marketplace before issues like rights management and territorial restrictions are solved.

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Election-Themed Videos That Are Too Late to the Game

Liz Shannon Miller — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:39:13 +0000

Tomorrow, no matter who wins the presidential election, there’s one group that will definitely be in a sad state — the intrepid content creators that have been putting out politically themed videos this week. So take a moment to mourn the online video filmmaker who produced a hilarious video while fighting off his Halloween hangover, because no matter how brilliant the concept, there’s an expiration date on America’s attention. Wednesday morning, we’ll wake up with a new America, and all of these videos will feel like old news.

But the fact that these videos are getting in just under the wire doesn’t mean they aren’t funny. Take, for example, Lando Calrissian for President, which is a hilarious mesh of Star Wars and American politics.

I have some major issues with the twists on continuity (how old was Lando Calrissian supposed to be when he opposed the Clone Wars, 11?), but by actually getting Billy Dee Williams (swoon) to speak frankly on the issues facing the Empire today, this is viral video gold. And it’s doing great today — 90,000 views in one day on Funny or Die — but that’ll undoubtedly drop off dramatically tomorrow. A shame. Because I love it so.

Another latecomer, Maverick Me Deadly: A Political Choose Your Own Adventure! isn’t quite as clever in concept, but the film noir style and production value are pretty remarkable, plus the actress playing Sarah Palin does a nice job of capturing the Alaskan governor’s essence while adding a femme fatale twist. (The actor playing John McCain is pretty far off, however.) And it also utilizes YouTube link annotations to leave the ending of the story up to viewers, which is always fun.

The hold-ups to releasing these videos were varied — for example, the writers of the cult Adult Swim comedy Shin Chan wrote a short piece using one of their characters to mock Sarah Palin’s nomination, but because of approval difficulties weren’t able to release it until Oct. 30th. The result, Sarah Palin Endorsed by Georgie Prescott 3, has pacing problems but hilarious dialogue performed by voice actress Brina Palencia.

And last week, sketch comedy geniuses Team Tiger Awesome, Invisible Engine, and Plan C teamed up for a series of political ads for an entirely different contest — the Vigilante ’08 race, in which voters are asked to choose which vigilante gang they want prowling the streets in your name. It’s a hilarious series of videos, but the political ad format will make the content seem out-of-date all too soon.

It’s hard to think of a national event that’s been as good for viral video as the election. So we can’t blame these and other filmmakers for wanting to take one last stab at some of those sweet, sweet SEO-enabled viewcounts. But nothing will alter the fact that after the past two years of non-stop coverage, tomorrow an election hangover is about to begin.

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The Ultimate Guide to Live Election Coverage

Liz Gannes — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:00:17 +0000

The interminable U.S. presidential campaign season will come finally come to an end tomorrow night. If you’re looking for a map with updating red and blue states (a tradition that dates back to NBC in the 1976 election, it turns out), we’ve got you covered. If you’re looking for more than that, we’ve got you covered, too.

Last week we wrote up some of the best places to watch election results online. Since we compiled that story, additional news outlets have finalized their plans of attack, and more people have pointed us to other great resources.

If you want to get your election news from a linear TV channel, that’s your call. But as Slate editor Joan Walsh told the New York Times, “At a time when almost anyone can check voter turnout in certain neighborhoods in Cuyahoga County, I don’t think everyone is going to sit there and wait to be spoon-fed the election results in the order Brian Williams thinks is appropriate.” So if you’re planning to set up a multiscreen command center, here are some sites to pull up:

Video streaming by Ustream

Both the presidential candidates, Rock the Vote, ABC News, PressPassTV (professional athletes talk politics…no really), OneNewsNow.com (conservative Christian coverage — embedded above) and Politico (YouTube favorite James Kotecki) will all be streaming on Ustream.TV. A ton of other outlets, including USA Today and a bunch of other Gannett properties, will be using live Mogulus channels.

The Associated Press will be issuing its first-ever live webcast, hosted by reporters from its Washington bureau, and including voter interviews.

The New York Times has built an online election dashboard that will incorporate news and state-by-state results as they are called by its staff and other major news organizations. On its home page, the NYT will publish videos every 30 minutes throughout the night from inside the newsroom. The paper is also catering to mobile users, with full results available for phones as well as text message news alerts. For alerts, send the word “NEWSALERTS” to 698698. To customize for a particular zip code,
send “ELECTIONS [ZIP CODE]” to 698698. All of the options are summarized in this blog post.

The Washington Post is hosting all its election coverage on an interactive map and timeline. Via socialmedian, users can chat about the election, see an aggregation of news sources with relevant Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube posts, and see hot discussion topics rise to the top.

For live citizen news from around the country, try The UpTake, which will be streaming reports on voter reaction and turnout.

The Personal Democracy Forum’s techPresident is also pulling together a “Twitter Vote Report,” effectively a citizen-created national exit poll that combines “tweets” about users’ voting experiences into a cohesive interface.

C-SPAN will offer live streams of John McCain‘s and Barack Obama‘s election night events via Mogulus.

ABC News will offer livestreams of its own newscast, the scene at both the McCain and Obama campaigns’ headquarters, and a stream of roving reporters in battleground states. It will also offer a live results map, searchable exit polling data, liveblogging and results via SMS.

CBS News will be offering county-by-county results updated every minute, liveblogging, as well as a simulcast of its TV coverage, starting at 6:30 p.m. EDT. Around 2 a.m. EDT, Katie Couric will host a live webcast on CBSNews.com and CNET.com to address participants’ questions.

Current is offering a user-contributed party. Instead talking heads blabbing away, it will instead a provide a pulsating map set to a live DJ set by Diplo. Contributions will pop up from users on Digg, Twitter and 12seconds.tv.

For an international perspective, Livestation will stream Al Jazeera English, BBC World News, euronews, France 24 and C-SPAN, and will integrate viewer comments with some of those networks.

Stateside, there is Fox News‘ Elections page, and its live video page (and embedded above is a tour of the channel’s election studio setup). FNC will offer a special live webcast of strategy discussion all night from New York.

CNN has a comprehensive Election Center. Users can also customize the site around the races they care most about. The site has its own team producing CNN.com Live video throughout the day and night.

Live (and embeddable!) video coverage will be available from MSNBC. Also see their “Decision ’08 Dashboard” — which consists of maps, fundraising and other data, as well as discussion.

Yahoo News will be simulcasting ABC News Now alongside a Political Dashboard, and Google will offer a results map with feeds from the AP.

If you want to go old-school — or maybe you’re just driving from one place to another — NPR will offer live radio coverage from 7 p.m. ET (and reporters will be tweeting as well).

As for text updates throughout the night, a great place to check will be Mememorandum, which tracks hot political stories and analysis. If you install this cool Greasemonkey script, you can see a red-and-blue overlay on links, indicating stories from conservative and liberal bloggers, respectively. Memeorandum tells us it will be increasing the speed with which items rotate off its site so that the newest news and analysis can dominate as they change throughout election night.

Meanwhile, who won’t be streaming live? Hulu, for one, even though it got in on the live debate action. Also, no Comedy Central Indecision 2008, sadly. Though if you go to Times Square it’s free on the JumboTron.

Nor will MySpace be embedding live coverage, as it had previously indicated it might. But it will be offering a live-updating map, text and video blogging by the MySpace Impact team and celebrities, as well as user-generated video.

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The Godfather Available for Digital Download

Chris Albrecht — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:01:19 +0000

Well, at the risk of making the obvious joke, The Godfather trilogy is about to make you a digital offer you can’t refuse. Starting Sept. 23, The Godfather, The Godfather II and The Godfather III will be available for the first time as digital downloads (they tried to stay out of the download world, but they keep pulling him back in!).

Paramount is almost leaving no stone unturned for the epic mafia saga, as it will be available through digital services iTunes, Amazon, Sony Playstation Network, “and more.” The press announcement was pretty slim on details, but The Godfather and The Godfather Part III (part II didn’t show up in searches or related fields) are available on iTunes right now, where you can pre-order it for purchase for $9.99. There is no HD version yet.

The Godfather, along with Jaws and Star Wars were recently lamented by Variety as classics that was still not available for rental or purchase in a digital format. Having The Godfather available as a download should help legitimize the market and spur other classics into the digital action. If these films don’t step into the modern world, the studios that own them might just end up sleeping with the fishes.

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Pirate Bay Imposters Launch Streaming Video Site, Get Media Attention

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:00:42 +0000

A tipster this weekend told us about an upcoming streaming video web site by The Pirate Bay called The Pirate City. The site was apparently launched last week to commemorate the 30th birthday of one of the Pirate Bay’s admins, but was quickly pulled because “something went wrong,” and now features a note promising to return in a few days. A streaming media platform run by the Pirate Bay: That does sound like a good story. Too bad it wasn’t true.

At last check, The Pirate City’s was still down. Google’s cache is still showing a site featuring the Pirate Bay’s logo but also a web design completely different from all of the Pirate Bay’s prior projects, which tend to follow the Craig Newmark school of minimalism. To make matters worse, there are some signs indicating that the “tipster” may actually be involved in running The Pirate City.

Turns out we weren’t the only ones contacted about the site. TechCrunch ran a post today in which it stated that, “[S]treaming is right around the corner,” for The Pirate Bay, later amending the post to note that The Pirate City is “not one of the Pirate Bay’s properties.” Still, the idea of the Pirate Bay offering streaming services is now out there, and likely to spread.

A quick look at the domain registration data reveals further discrepancies. The site is hosted on a server in the UK and registered anonymously through a Russian domain registrar. Neither is typical behavior for the Pirate Bay whose admins not only own their own hosting company, but are usually very up front about their projects. All of the Pirate Bay’s known projects are registered under the real names of their administrators. Never mind the fact that the Pirate Bay has previously experimented with it’s own streaming video site called The Video Bay.

However, the stunt of getting on TechCrunch made us a little more curious, and we started to look further. Turns out that the tipster who contacted NewTeeVee (and probably TechCrunch as well) has been looking for coders for streaming video projects online. A TechCrunch commenter also noticed that The Pirate City featured a reference to an entity called “divxvidz”.

The Pirate City is currently hosted on a dedicated server, but divxvidz.com still offers access to an empty sub-directory called thepiratecity.org, suggesting that the site was originally placed on a shared hosting environment. And guess who registered divxvidz.com? Exactly, our supposed tipster.

This isn’t the first time imposters have tried to make a quick buck on sites like the Pirate Bay. There is a porn torrent site out there that touts itself as being part of the Bay’s “Moderated Network,” and Piratebay.com actually tries to get users to pay hard cash in order to get “online help and support” for BitTorrent downloads.

Some people would of course point to the irony of pirating being forced to struggle with plagiarists, but we prefer our hooks and wooden legs to be the real thing.

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Amy Poehler to Star in Web Series for Girls

Chris Albrecht — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:27:24 +0000

Hot on the heels of her skit with Tina Fey as Sarah Palin burning up the Internet, Amy Poehler will launch and star in a new web series for young girls. Smart Girls at the Party will be created and distributed through ON Networks and “celebrates young girls who are changing the world by being themselves,” according to a press release.

In each episode, Poehler will interview a girl with a unique talent, community interest or point of view, and the show promises to range from the funny to the serious. The first season of Smart Girls will kick off in October and will be shown on ON as well as syndicated to iTunes, Adobe Media Player and more. Though Poehler announced she’s leaving Saturday Night Live after the election, and she has her own sitcom in the works, its nice to see her creating a web series that’s a little different from what’s already out there.

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Q&A With Cavalcade‘s Seth MacFarlane

Liz Shannon Miller — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:30:04 +0000

I was able to attend an advance screening of Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy (our review of the series is here) last week, and afterwards sit down for a short Q&A with MacFarlane and representatives from production company Media Rights Capital, Burger King (who sponsors the series) and Google (who will be distributing Cavalcade via AdSense). Please excuse the amateur sound and editing…

Here are a few details that didn’t make it into the video:

MacFarlane does admit that there’s potential for 50 more episodes: “If they do really well, then maybe.”
Cavalcade was produced during the WGA strike last winter, but was Guild-approved thanks to an interim agreement struck with MRC, the producing company.
Only the first 10 episodes will be associated with Burger King (which has its own YouTube channel hosting the sketches); all will be available at the SethComedy web site and YouTube channel. As for the exact release schedule, “It’s flexible,” according to MacFarlane — for now, they’re promising the release of one or two shorts a week.

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NewTeeVee Interview With Ashton Kutcher

Liz Gannes — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 01:02:16 +0000

I had a chance to sit down with Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg this morning, partners at Katalyst Media. The two launched their first web show, Blah Girls, an animated celebrity gossip series, at noon today following a presentation at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco where Kutcher tried to combine, much as his TV program does, both the beauty and the geek.

Embedded below is the premiere episode of the show, along with a video of our interview, which covered topics like these:

- Blah Girls will come out twice a week, most likely Monday and Thursday on BlahGirls.com, Yahoo, YouTube, and other partners
- Kutcher has never seen Arrested Development (he likes lower-brow humor)
- The challenge of making an animated (in other words, slow to produce) show about the fast-paced world of celebrity news
- What Kutcher watches online: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (though he didn’t quite get the name right), Funny or Die, YouTube, fantasy football stuff
- Kutcher’s impressions of paparazzi journalism and fair use

For me, the first episode didn’t kill, but at least it’s got a sense of humor. Besides, I absolutely love Arrested Development, though I have followed Beauty and the Geek too. Kutcher, of course, has an audience of his own, and said he’ll be promoting the site to his hundreds of thousands of MySpace friends…so that’s a start.

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