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E3 Live-Streaming Breaks Records for Viacom, G4

Liz Shannon Miller — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:30:46 +0000

Multimedia news and review site IGN scored big with its live-streaming coverage of this month’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. At peak viewership, there were 118,000 concurrent viewers, and viewers on average spent over an hour on the site — 65.09 minutes, precisely. IGN had teamed up with YouTube for the expo, including all of the major press conferences. But other sites were also successful streaming the event.

Spike TV and Gametrailers.com, which are both owned by Viacom, drew a combined 10 million viewers for both online and televised coverage of the event, according to an emailed release. More than 2.1 million live sessions were generated for the Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo and Sony press conferences — the most in Viacom history.

Also, the Comcast-owned G4TV.com (see disclosure below) had its biggest week of traffic ever, according to a G4 representative, breaking all previous records with 1.5 million unique visitors. The average time spent on the site was another record-breaker — over 13 minutes — with over 7.6 million video plays across all platforms. This includes live-streaming and video watched via the G4 iPhone App.

What goes through my head, looking at these numbers, is what other events of this nature could potentially benefit from live-streaming coverage. Take, for example, the San Diego Comic-Con. While hardly an industry-only event, Comic-Con has exploded to such an extent over the past several years that it’s pretty much impossible to experience everything you might want to, and the level of crowd control demanded as a result verges on the insane. A virtual pass to the festivities might go over well for fans who prefer to watch from afar — and avoid the unwashed masses.

Disclosure: I recently worked as a consulting writer on G4TV.com’s “Attack of the Show,” but am not a Comcast employee and did not contribute to any of G4′s E3 coverage.

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Jace Hall Show Amps Up for New Season on IGN

Liz Shannon Miller — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:30:46 +0000

You might make the argument that the web doesn’t need another talk show of any sort — there are plenty of personalities, from the more traditional form used by Bob Kushell to that of DIGGnation and other direct-address series. But there’s always room for someone who can find a new spin on the format, such as Jace Hall, host and creator of The Jace Hall Show.

The first two seasons of Jace Hall ran on Crackle beginning May 2008, but the third season of Jace Hall premiered last week on IGN. Publisher and SVP of Content for IGN Entertainment Peer Schneider stated in a press release that “Jace and IGN are perfect bedfellows – his show blends the world of celebrities and the videogame industry’s hottest personalities with an irreverent voice that’s totally in synch with IGN.” Which pretty much means that he talks the nerd talk.

In comparison to the show’s earlier Crackle run, the new season is shockingly more kinetic, with an intense pace that will keep even the shortest attention span entertained. The use of on-screen text to emphasize points remains consistent, however, as well as Hall’s own informal, quasi-fictional style that inspires comparisons to Curb Your Enthusiasm — but at times more bizarre.

With his emphasis split pretty much between web, television and video games, that opens up much of the entertainment world for Hall, who, as a former senior VP with Warner Brothers Interactive whose production company has a first look deal with the studio, scores some impressive “gets” for his show.

Instead of each segment playing out as a whole, the surprisingly tight 12 minute third season premiere intercuts between at least four or five different elements. These include: A Wii boxing match between Rocky IV stars Dolph Lungren and Carl Weathers, Hot for Words‘ Marina’s attempts to define the word “n00bie,” an office visit to Blizzard Studios and a meetup with Michael “Dorkman” Scott that ends with the kickoff to a lightsaber battle with Felicia Day (seriously).

Based on the “coming soon” clip at the end of the episode, it looks like some of these sequences will continue throughout the six-episode season, which is an economical solution to maintaining an all-star line-up — though it means the show will be much less stand-alone than before. However, the visceral pleasures of each individual clip, even when disconnected from the narrative, are overall consistent, and Hall brings a striking energy to the show. It’s a skewed look at the pop culture world, but it’s also a crude delight.

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IGN’s iPWN: The Newest (And Hopefully Last) iPhone App Review Show

Liz Shannon Miller — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:30:37 +0000

All right, this is it: No more iPhone app review shows. You hear that, guys? It’s done. For as much a boom industry as it might be, devoting many many series to covering emerging new programs and technologies for the mobile device is just, frankly, unnecessary.

My final review is of the most recent show to hit the streets, iPWN, produced by Portal A Ltd. and hosted by video game and entertainment site IGN. Launched yesterday, the series features a variety of techniques for covering the world of mobile gaming — from lightning-fast reviews to opinion pieces to profiles of game creators. This varied approach distinguishes iPWN from other iPhone-reviewing series like iPhun and AppJudgment, but possibly the biggest difference can be found in iPWN’s relative lack of human touch. While other series derive a fair amount of credibility from their hosts, iPWN takes a different approach.

Sure, animated avatars standing in for human commentators aren’t terribly new — GOOD News being only one example that comes to mind — but the floating man-sized iPhone known as “TJ” brings a slightly fouler mouth to the proceedings than you’d expect. Most of the profanity he spews over the course of these reviews is bleeped out, leading one to wonder why IGN bothers to put age restrictions on the clips. Perhaps it’s due to some of the more sexually-oriented jokes that trickle into the writing, and to be sure, bleeping only does so much.

However, that edgy quality is a good fit for the young male audience of IGN, and while the Mass Debate segment (say that out loud and fast and you’ll get the joke) lacks focus, I thought the super-brief reviews of games from every category of the iPhone store were potentially quite helpful for anyone looking for a good puzzle or kids game. Production values are also solid, with the tight pace of episodes lending itself well to online distribution.

Really, the only major fault of iPWN is that while it’d be great content for a more tech-oriented web site, it doesn’t seem like a perfect fit for IGN, where previous video successes have been much more in the fake trailer for a Legend of Zelda film model. Profanity, alas, does not equal entertainment.

On balance iPWN does enough interesting stuff to keep around — but seriously web series creators, I mean it. That’s it. No more.

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UGC Buys Out the Critics: Flixster Acquires Rotten Tomatoes

Liz Gannes — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:57:12 +0000

UPDATED

In a bit of an unconventional deal, startup Flixster is acquiring Rotten Tomatoes, the authoritative online movie review aggregator, from News Corp. The acquisition gives News Corp., via its subsidiary IGN Entertainment, a minority stake in Flixster, which operates movie trivia and fan review applications on social networks and mobile devices.

The combined company will continue to operate separately branded properties for user-generated and professional movie reviews. Together, they have 30 million monthly uniques, 2.3 billion user reviews, 500,000 critic reviews, as well as movie information and social games, according to a press release.

The first reports of the deal came last month from Kara Swisher at BoomTown, who said at the time that News Corp. was considering buying Flixster. Update: Swisher points out that she later reported the deal would be a combined independent company, as was indeed the result.

Prior to the deal, Flixster had $7 million in funding from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pinnacle Ventures and Reid Hoffman.

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