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What multiplatform means to Vuguru

Liz Shannon Miller — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 07:01:32 +0000

Vuguru is one of those rarities in the web content world: a company that has been actively financing and producing web content since 2007, without going out of business. That sounds cynical, sure, but if you look back at the era when the company first became active, it’s hard not to notice that the other digital studios springing up during those years — including Stage 9 and Veoh — are now barely remembered footnotes for this industry.

But Vuguru seems to be doing well, thanks to Rogers Media funding and an approach to creating truly multiplatform content with an international focus.

The company’s latest release is Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a portrait of the many men and women affected by the U.S. Military’s policies regarding homosexuality in the armed forces. The release was written, created by and stars Mark Wolf as, well, everybody. Launched last week on Snagfilms.com, Don’t Ask will also premiere on Hulu next week — timed to correspond with the official end of the DADT policy on Sept. 20, 2011.

Don’t Ask originated as an off-Broadway one-man show featuring Wolf, which Vuguru founder Michael Eisner happened to see while he was in New York. “The performance was so great, and the stories were so compelling, and only a few hundred people were going to see it. So we had the idea to make it much bigger and adapt it to our format,” Vuguru CEO Larry Tanz said.

The Vuguru format, in this case, looks like this: A piece of content running approximately 100 minutes is broken down into “chapters” of somewhat varying lengths, which can then be packaged and sold domestically and internationally to, essentially, whomever is interested. This can mean that international markets see a show before it makes it to America. For instance, Prom Queen: Homecoming, a followup to the Myspace hit Prom Queen, has yet to premiere in the U.S. despite finishing production in July 2009. But it’s also allowed Vuguru-produced content to have an international presence.

It’s a model used by other companies as well: one example is Crackle’s The Bannen Way, which premiered as a web series but has aired internationally as a telefilm. Don’t Ask‘s international rights have not yet been sold, but according to Tanz they’ll be bringing the project to MIPCOM for just that purpose.

The Booth at the End launched on Hulu as five 22-minute installments, but has also aired internationally, thanks to a deal with Fox International. For its release on the UK web content site FX, the show was split into 62 two-minute chapters, with two a day premiering over a month-long period.

According to Tanz, Vuguru uses the term “chapter” for its episodes to distinguish its content from other web shows: there are no opening or closing credits, making it easy for people to watch multiple episodes in a row — which data shows they do, especially if they happen upon a later episode of the show. “With The Booth at the End, people who jumped in in the middle, say with Chapter 3, would jump back to the first chapter. If you hook them in, they’ll go back to the beginning. It works because it’s on demand.”

Vuguru is currently working on two projects for AOL as part of the six-series deal struck last November: A suburban mom comedy called Little Women, Big Cars, featuring Antonio Sabato Jr., Kristy Swanson, Julie Warner and Ed Begley Jr., is currently in post-production and should premiere in Q1 or Q2 of 2012. Production has also begun on another comedy about a woman starting her own dog-walking business. (Both shows are targeted towards AOL’s large, advertiser-friendly female audience.)

Vuguru retains the international rights to these shows and will market them accordingly, with the only difference between them and Don’t Ask being what to call them. “Comedies feel more episodic, while dramas work better as longer-form experiences. Don’t Ask is more of a multiplatform film, while we’re more likely to call a comedy a multiplatform series,” Tanz said.

Multiplatform can mean a lot of things these days, but for Tanz, the term means there are many places for people to see the show, with online being the first — but the production is high-quality enough to work for broadcast.

“Everything we do is broadcast quality,” Tanz said, which makes it easier for Vuguru to bring to other markets and platforms. “For our buyers, it’s easy to put on all your platforms — and possible to put on your best platform.”

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How Do You Define Web Series Success?

Liz Shannon Miller — Sun, 08 May 2011 07:01:49 +0000

In the independent web series world, success can be tough to define. Sure, there are bootstrapping shows that are undeniably winners, but for every Guild there’s the series that may have never reached mainstream success, but helped its creator land a more prominent gig, or led to a merchandising deal or adaptation into another medium.

For example, The Guild started out as independent production, completed with the help of crowdsourced funds before making a deal with Microsoft for distribution. But it encompasses every element of web series success — it was picked up by a major distributor, has lead to spinoff projects in other formats like comic books, and helped those involved find other projects — not just Felicia Day, but also Sandeep Parikh and Jeff Lewis.

What other shows represent success of some sort in this space? Below is a list representing some of the best examples out there for independent creators. The three parameters for success we’re using here: The series was picked up by a major distributor, has made real money through independent distribution, and/or has led to a deal for those involved to do larger projects.

Undoubtedly, there are some shows I’m overlooking here. But that’s because there have been many big wins in the space over the past few years.

lonelygirl15: Produced quasi-independently (with some support from the Creative Artists Agency), this series blossomed into long-running web serial. Subsequently, the production team has evolved into new media studio that partners with brands and celebrities to fuel web content.

Sam Has 7 Friends: Produced independently as a web series and acquired by Vuguru, creators Big Fantastic went on to produce Prom Queen, Sorority Forever and many other original web series.

Sanctuary: Produced independently as a web series, picked up by Sci Fi Channel (before it was SyFy) and adapted into a television series, now in its third season.

The Burg: Produced independently by Kathleen Grace and Thom Woodley, who then got the opportunity to create The All-For-Nots, an original series for Vuguru. Grace went on to work for Next New Networks; following the Google acquisition, she is now Head of Creator Outreach for YouTube.

Easy to Assemble: Produced independently in the form of Supermarket to the Stars, then found sponsorship with IKEA.

Dorm Life: Produced independently, got major sponsorship in Season 2 from Carl’s Jr.

Old Jews Telling Jokes: Produced by Jetpack Media, breaks even on production but published a book compilation last fall.

Riese: Produced independently as a web series, now running on syfy.com domestically and on other sites internationally.

The Mercury Men: Produced independently as a web series (never distributed), picked up by SyFy for distribution.

Universal Dead: Produced independently, acquired by Unconventional Films for adaptation into a 3-D feature.

Mortal Kombat: Produced independently as a short film, picked up by Warner Bros. for a web-distributed series running on Machinima.com.

Working Class Foodies: Produced through the Next New Creators program, recently announced cookbook deal.

Asylum: Produced independently, picked up by BET along with three other series.

There are plenty of other examples, and if there are glaring ones, the comments are an excellent place to share them. The key thing is this: Success is often dependent on what you hope to achieve — knowing that and planning for it is half the battle.

Thanks to Cyndy, Modelmotion, Mathieas, Jason, Rebecca and the others who chimed in with their suggestions of shows for this list!

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AOL Steps Up Video Strategy With Relaunched Home Page

Liz Shannon Miller — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:24:31 +0000

Over the last few weeks, AOL’s video strategy has blasted off, with new shows from Next New Networks and Vuguru being added. The new focus on video content comes from this month’s complete redesign of the AOL.com home page, which emphasizes visual media and a more topical focus.

“We looked at what our mission should be — informing, entertaining, and connecting visitors with the world,” AOL Home Page General Manager Chris Grosso said via phone, “And video was a big part of that.”

The 15 million people who visit AOL.com every day, according to Grosso, skew to the heavily media savvy, with extremely high usage of VOD and DVR services and a tendency to multitask — thus, Grosso believes, showing the audience has a strong interest in online video content. “The audience wants things that are very topical, news-driven. Celebrity-driven content also does well,” Grosso said. “Visitors are very well-informed, often looking for the story behind the story.”

This plays into the home page programming strategy, which is broken down according to parts of the day. In the mornings, the content has a more newsy focus, with featured videos including the topical series You’ve Got.

Afternoons include more “snacky” content, such as NNN’s The One, which runs daily at 1:oo p.m. ET (just in time for afternoon lunch or coffee breaks). Evenings feature more service-y content, such as how-to videos from recent AOL acquisition 5min or internally produced Stylist makeover tips.

Soon to be included in the mix is a minimum of six scripted series from Vuguru. “I’m pretty sure we won’t be the only scripted content on AOL,” Vuguru President Larry Tanz said via phone, “But we are a key part of the premium scripted part of their strategy.”

Teenagers don’t make up much of the AOL home page audience, according to Grosso — the average age of the AOL home page visitor is 39 to 40 — but Tanz said that Vuguru’s more teen-friendly content might be seeded out to AOL-owned properties like the adolescent-skewing Cambio.

However, Tanz was certain not to underestimate the home page’s ability to launch a show, even one aimed at a specific demographic. “The home page will be a place for discovery — it’s an amazing platform to launch properties,” he said.

Disclosure: In the past, I freelanced for the AOL-owned Lemondrop.com. I have not written for the site since December 2009.

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Vid-Biz: YouTube’s War Room, BBC iPad App, NCAA in 3-D

Ryan Lawler — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:30:24 +0000

Inside YouTube’s War Room; every day since the redesign, core members of the team have met in what has been dubbed the “YouTube War Room,” a conference center where the team gathers to discuss and address the feedback coming from YouTube’s forums, blog post comments and even the Twitterverse. (Mashable)

BBC iPad App Popular In U.S., But Brits May Be Denied; the BBC may have postponed its planned mobile phone apps for regulatory scrutiny in its native UK, but in the U.S., where it operates commercially, the new iPad app is already a big hit. (paidContent:UK)

Malone Steps Down From DirecTV Board; Liberty Media chairman John Malone is resigning from DirecTV’s board, reducing his 24.3 percent voting interest in the company to a 3 percent stake and exchanging his 21.8 million Class B shares for 26 million Class A shares. (Multichannel News)

The Problems with the iPad and Streaming Video; the iPad may be a marvelous and elegant new kind of computing device, but the inconsistent WiFi connection and subsequent buffering is insufferable for consuming streaming video. (Beet.TV)

UK Government Forced To Drop Key Clauses in Digital Economy Bill; the U.K. government will sacrifice clauses enabling the national rollout of replacement ITV regional news services and giving Ofcom more power as part of last-minute political horse-trading to get the Digital Economy Bill passed into law. (paidContent:UK)

Vuguru Bulks Up; the Internet production firm backed by Michael Eisner’s Tornante and Canada’s Rogers Communications continues to beef up its exec ranks with the appointment of Miramax production alum Kristin Jones as chief creative officer. (Variety)

Funai Taps Widevine for Distribution on Connected Devices; Funai — which manufactures CE devices sold under the Philips, Magnavox, Sylvania and Emerson brands — will incorporate adaptive streaming technology and DRM from Widevine. (InteractiveTV Today)

Cisco Sees Flip Camera Catching on with Corporate Users; The Flip camera is finding its way into the corporates suites of Proctor & Gamble, Cisco and other big companies. (Beet.TV)

YouTube’s Chad Hurley Tapped for Streamys Visionary Award; the Board of Directors of the International Academy of Web Television has selected YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley to receive its inaugural Visionary Award at the 2nd Annual Streamy Awards. (Tubefilter)

Vid-Biz: CBS, Vuguru, MGM HD

Ryan Lawler — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:30:04 +0000

CBS Interactive Dumps Ad Networks; CBS will soon begin selling all inventory for CBS.com, Gamespot, TV.com and CNET on its own, rather than use third-party ad networks. (AdAge)

Eisner’s Vuguru Hires Agility Studios’ Tanz As President; before running Agility, Tanz was president and CEO of LivePlanet, which he started with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. (paidContent)

MGM and BSkyB in Launch HD Movie Channel; MGM HD is a 50-50 joint venture between the movie studio and the broadcaster, and is the first branded channel for the studio in the UK (Broadband TV News)

Prices of Flat-Panel TVs Continue to Fall; the average price of a 32-inch LCD is $600, about half of what it was in 2006. (NY Times)

How Spike TV Is Driving Digital Revenue From the Video Game Awards; last year, 10 million people watched the awards, 2.3 million of them males 18-34. (paidContent)

Sonic Solutions Partners With verve-media for Interactive Video Commerce; will integrate the interactive commerce capabilities into its Roxio CinemaNow video service. (InteractiveTV Today)

TV Still Has a Hold on Teenagers; European teenagers spend an average of 10.3 hours a week watching television, compared with 9.1 hours on personal — rather than work- or school-related — use of the Internet. (NY Times)

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Vuguru Spins Out With Funding From Rogers

Liz Gannes — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:20:48 +0000

Vuguru, the digital studio run by Michael Eisner’s The Tornante Co., will become a standalone entity with investment and a distribution agreement with Canada’s Rogers Media, the broadcasting and publishing arm of Rogers Communications.

The deal is significant for Vuguru, which was out front of the original premium online video movement but simply hasn’t made very much content. With the new investment, the company plans to eventually make 30 web series per year (next year, a more modest 10 to 15). Rogers will have exclusive Canadian rights to the projects (which, no offense to the big online video watchers in Canada, is only a sliver of the total potential market for any content).

The deal keeps Eisner on as chairman of Vuguru, which he’d started in 2006 (see our initial story). So far, the company has made Prom Queen with Big Fantastic, which saw some 15 million views in its first run but only made “a couple thousand dollars,” though it later was sold internationally and as a DVD. Then Vuguru made The All-For-Nots, Foreign Body, and Back on Topps — of which the latter was the biggest success. Topps was sold to Comedy Central, which is developing it as a TV pilot.

The company is now (finally) launching another season of Prom Queen, which it’s now calling a “hit franchise” — not too big of a stretch in this day and age of web content, but interesting since Eisner had previously said publicly there wasn’t much money in it. Other series include (from the press release) “The Booth at the End, a new psychological thriller created by Internet-savvy writer Christopher Kubasik and helmed by veteran television director Jessica Landaw; and Pretty Tough, an adaptation of a successful young adult novel from accomplished television writer and producer Liz Tigelaar.”

Having built-in paid distribution is a good way to make money from original web content, though the size of the Rogers investment has not yet been disclosed. Vuguru also said it would “work with brand sponsors and distribution platforms to meet their programming goals.”

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Fact or Fiction: Where Is Branded Online Video Going?

Liz Shannon Miller — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:00:02 +0000

Last month, groundbreaking production company EQAL (the creators of “lonelygirl15″) announced that it would no longer be producing scripted series, instead creating content to go along with previously established brands. It was a decision that disappointed many loyal fans, but it just might be the direction the online video industry is going.

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FoxSports.com to Premiere New Vuguru Comedic Sports Show

Liz Gannes — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:38:27 +0000

Michael Eisner’s web video shop Vuguru — which got off to a promising start with Prom Queen last year but has only done a couple not-so-buzzy series since then — is giving FoxSports.com a 12-hour exclusive on new episodes of its next show, Back On Topps, according to MediaWeek.

The series is to be a 17-episode mockumentary about heirs to the Topps Co. dealing with the arrival of new management. While the show’s characters are fictional, it borrows some elements with reality, as Eisner bought the the baseball card and collectibles company last year. “The Office meets the SportsCenter commercials” is reportedly the idea. Click here for some preview clips (which will probably resize your browser, sorry). Episodes will come out Tuesday and Thursday, starting tomorrow.

Pushing the show to FoxSports.com is an example of a strategy we are seeing increasingly frequently, where web video makers look for distribution on a site they think will align with their audience, rather than going directly to a broader site like YouTube or MySpace, where their show might get lost. Last week we wrote about how Easy to Assemble, a riff on TV shows and fame, will be distributed on TV.com.

But these deals are just for a set time period of exclusivity, after which super-distribution is the norm. After the initial 12 hours, Back on Topps will also be distributed on YouTube, Veoh, Hulu, Blip, Bebo, Metacafe, Dailymotion, MobiTV, iTunes and backontopps.com.

Back on Topps stars the former hosts of ESPN’s Cheap Seats, Randy and Jason Sklar, and will have cameos from sports stars like Kevin Love, Russell Martin, Matt Holliday, Baron Davis and Dennis Rodman. Skype is its first sponsor.

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Vuguru’s Foreign Body Takes (it) Off

Chris Albrecht — Wed, 28 May 2008 04:00:54 +0000

Foreign Body, the new online series from Michael Eisner’s Vuguru and book publisher Putnam, launched the first of 50 episodes today. The series is doing double duty as the prequel to, and a promotional vehicle for the upcoming Robin Cook book of the same name and is created by Big Fantastic, the team behind Vuguru’s previous online hit, Prom Queen.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

The story is an “exotic thriller” centered around medical tourism in India, focusing on “a group of dangerous Indian beauties” whose nursing skills will be put to some nefarious use. From the first episode, it’s clear Body is staying true to most popular entertainment on the web by having one of the said beauties stripping down to her underwear for a quick, pointless frolic in the ocean. The trailer shows that this is just one of many, errr, titillating moments to come.

But will people stick around that long?

There are 50, two-minute episodes which will be released daily. That’s 10 weeks. That’s a whole lotta content. Prom Queen racked up 15 million views, but the vast majority of those were at the beginning of the series. Stats won’t matter as much for this series because it’s really more of about the promo for Cook’s upcoming book, but still, could the story have been served better with fewer episodes? We’ll have to watch and see. (Perhaps Foreign Body will be translated into a shot-for-shot remake Japanese.)

Eisner said he made a couple thousand dollars on the first run of Prom Queen, but lost money on its second season, Summer Heat. Whereas Prom Queen cost Vuguru about $3,000 for every 90 seconds, Foreign Body cost upwards of $10,000 per ~~minute~~ episode, according to Ryan Wise of Big Fantastic.

Eisner recently said that he thinks storytelling is the next killer app for the web, and that we’ve only just begun to see what’s possible. Interestingly, he also said he doesn’t think good content needs to be broken down into bite-sized nuggets, which almost makes you wonder why Vuguru went with such short episodes over a 10-week release schedule.

With its “big” budget and on-location filming in India, Foreign Body is an ambitious project. Now we’ll have to see if the audience is up to the task.

Tip of the hat to ReelPopBlog.

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How Many Episodes Should a Series Launch with?

Chris Albrecht — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:06:08 +0000

A director friend called to tell me about a new web series he’s working on. We were chatting when he asked “How many episodes should I launch with?” Hmmm… That’s an interesting question. The web is so much more flexible than oldteevee, you could release as few or as many at a time as you like.

How many you kick the series off with probably depends on the type of content you are creating. If it’s a sketch comedy series, you could release one and then wait either another day or week before releasing the second, since each bit would standalone (and hopefully go viral).

But what do you do if you’re trying to tell a story?

Sci-Fi, drama, even sitcoms are based on character development and plot — not jokes. When you’re telling stories in 2 to 5 minute increments, it’s hard to provide enough elements to get people hooked with just one episode. So how many episodes is ideal to get viewers to keep coming back?

I asked Jane Hu of Tornante/Vuguru her thoughts on the subject. Below is her lightly-edited response via email:

“I think it ultimately depends on the type of content. In general, launching with multiple episodes allows people to get more invested in the show early on. For example, The All-For-Nots launched with three episodes (and continue to release three at a time each week). For our mysteries where episodes end in a cliffhanger (Prom Queen, etc.), I think the cliffhanger produces an additional incentive to come back to the show, so launching with multiple episodes becomes less important.”

Other producers have told me that it also depends on how many episodes your series is. If you only have six or so, they thought it would be a good idea to launch them all at once.

But what do you think? Understanding the variables we just discussed, as a viewer, how many episodes do you generally need to really get into a show? As a creator, what’s the best way to keep the audience engaged? And if you’re a business person, how much do you want to string them out to maximize your advertising/sponsorship potential?

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