Tabletop

Part of the Geek and Sundry YouTube network (along with Felicia Day’s Flog and the whimsical Written by a Kid), Tabletop was one of this year’s case models for the concept that web video audiences are ready for longer content.

The Wil Wheaton-hosted series sat down geek celebs like Alex Albrecht, Morgan Webb, Jane Espenson, Amber Benson and Ryan Higa to play a wide range of dice, card and board games, consistently reaching six-figure viewcounts (impressive for a half-hour long show). But what I find especially cool about Tabletop is the gaming community that’s come out of it, showcased primarily via the Tumblr blog Seen on Tabletop, where viewers are encouraged to submit their experiences playing the games featured on the show.

The last new episode of Tabletop was posted November 1st, but “Seen on Tabletop” is still updating regularly: Right now, it’s flooded with posts featuring the post-Christmas gaming adventures of its fans.

The Onion Digital Studios

Some of the best unrecognized serial content this year came from an entity not necessarily known for narrative: The Onion turned out some original scripted shows this year, especially Sex House and Porkin’ Across America, that built on the brand’s reputation for comedy, but in a long-form format.

Both shows begin as your standard reality TV show parody — Sex House riffing on The Real World, while Porkin’ Across America took on Guy Fieri-esque food travel series. But head writer Sam West and the creative team at the Onion take those premises down the darkest and strangest roads you can imagine, drawing funny out of the least-likely subjects, such as crack-addicted nieces, food poisoning and deadly mold. The tone is consistent with The Onion’s predilection towards pitch-black comedy, but while the sicker your sense of humor, the more rewarding these shows are, both shows proved to be smarter and more ambitious than what came before.

The Onion has continued putting out more stand-alone content, such as its TED Talks parody series Onion Talks. But YouTube viewcounts for Sex House and Porkin’ Across America are on par or even better with those videos, so hopefully 2013 contains more of the same.

YOMYOMF

Founded by Fast and the Furious director Justin Lin, YOMYOMF (a very-fun-to-say acronym for You Offend Me, You Offend My Family, the pop culture blog from which the channel was born) used its YouTube funding for some impressively well-produced series, ranging from the very funny 21 Jump Street parody Squad 85 to the award-nominated sci-fi adventure DR0NE.

This Slate piece goes into detail about the network’s approach to content creation with an emphasis on diversity — I also enjoy YOMYOMF’s epic introduction to its unique POV and impressive talent roster, which includes Ryan Higa, Kevjumba, Chester See, Jamie Chung, Rick Fox, Jessica Alba, Amy Okuda, Harry Shum Jr., Gillian Jacobs, Masi Oka and many many more.

Daily Grace and My Drunk Kitchen

“Daily” Grace Helbig and Hannah “My Drunk Kitchen” Hart aren’t just two of the funniest women on the web — they’re two of the funniest women in comedy, flat out. Both bring their unique voices to their individual shows (the Daily Grace vlog appears — surprise — daily on My Damn Channel, while Hart posts weekly on YouTube) while also spreading the love to numerous other series: Helbig co-stars in the Fine Brothers’s MyMusic, for example, while Hart was just interviewed by Rainn Wilson’s SoulPancake.
And when the two appear together, the results are almost painfully hilarious. As just one recent example, here are Helbig and Hart attempting to make egg nog live on What’s Trending‘s #Tubeathon. Note the word “attempt” in that sentence. Both Hart and Helbig broke onto the online scene prior to 2012, but it was this year that they became iconic members of the web video scene.

What’s the lesson I take from all this? That this is an era that rewards collaboration and multiplatform engagement. And the people having success in the space right now are those who aren’t afraid to experiment, and perceive the brand as bigger than the individual show or shows that make it up.

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The landing will be livestreamed via NASA TV here, and JPL Ustream with commentary here (or without commentary here.)  NASA TV is also available via satellite TV. Gamers can view the landing live on their Xbox 360 consoles, according to Microsoft’s Major Nelson blog and warm up for it with the Kinect Mars Rover simulator (free download required).

If you want to prep now, check out two “Grand Entrance” videos, one hosted by William Shatner, the other by Wil Wheaton, detailing the project. Or, for a social experience, sign onto a  Google+ Hangout hosted by the SETI Institute to watch the live stream and chat.

There are also a variety of in-person events at local planetaria and other venues including at Western Kentucky University’s Hardin Planetarium  in Bowling Green; Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory (in the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon no less); Columbia, Mo. and elsewhere. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory posted a list of local events here.

Here’s the thing though: a lot can go wrong on the Rover’s descent. The big question is whether the soft landing that NASA engineers have worked on for years will actually happen, given Mars’ thin atmosphere. The landing sequence calls for the deployment of a gigantic parachute, a heat shield that burns away at 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, a detachable landing crane and booster rockets, all of which are needed to slow the craft down from 13,000 mph in 7 minutes to a speed that can facilitate the aforementioned soft landing. There’s an awful lot of variables in that mix — if one thing fails, all bets are off. (Space.com posted a timeline on past Mars expeditions. The success rate is not high.) Adding to the suspense, it takes 14 minutes for the signal from the Rover to get to Earth.

A soft landing would mean that the Curiosity Rover can get on with its work, which includes examining and reporting back on the weather, geology and radiation levels on the red planet. One key question that it could help answer, as Wheaton  and Shatner state in their respective videos, is whether there was ever life on Mars.

And, in the off chance you’re not one of the 1.2 million-plus people that have seen NASA’s “7 minutes of terror” video, here’s your chance to catch up and get ready for Sunday night’s main event.

Photos courtesy of  Flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video

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Actor/geek Wil Wheaton started to see the results almost immediately, posting late Wednesday afternoon:

Did G+ roll out some new “invite everyone you follow to an event” thing? My feed is completely overwhelmed with “everyone’s invited to XXXXX event” notices, and I’m having a hard time actually seeing posts from people I’m following. … Is there a way to opt-out of event invites from people I don’t follow or have circled? Is this yet another thing Google rolled out without thinking it through clearly?

A little later, he was getting a better understanding of the new feature but it was too late:

It’s too bad that I’ll never use it, and will kill it with fire, because Google has, yet again, made a product that may be useful and cool, but forced it upon users without giving users any control over how invasive it is.

Wheaton not only has a large following, he’s an active poster and checkers his Google+ feed every half hour or so when he’s online. He likes Google+ and is just as frustrated by what he sees as Google’s failure with it as he was with this feature gone awry:

Instead of talking about how cool this thing is, and how excited we are to use it, a significant number of G+ users — and people like Linus Torvalds, who are way more influential than I am are among them — are talking about how annoyed they are and how much they hate it.

Is that the rollout that Google was hoping for? Has Google learned nothing from doing things like this in the past? I’m starting to believe that this isn’t an accident, or poor planning, but by design; I just can’t figure out why.

Author John Scalzi was irked enough to post around midnight Wednesday:

My newest circle is “People who send me a ‘test’ Google Events Invite, and must therefore be torn apart by ravenous bears.” Try not to be in it. The bears are getting tired.

By Thursday, Wheaton was trying again, providing examples, to back up his contention that only people in your own circles should be allowed to send you Events. Among them: unwanted invitations and messages about the Guild Wars 2 release date. The last straw was someone who set up a fake event with Wheaton’s name in it, prompting him to warn “the system as it’s set up right now is ripe for abuse.”

That finally drew a chagrined response in Wheaton’s comments from Vic Gundotra, the Google SVP of engineering responsible for Google+:

“We are doing exactly what you requested. We should have contemplated and anticipated how people would abuse this and how painful this could be for celebrities with large followings.

We have pushed a number of fixes yesterday (some were bug fixes that showed up at scale). Expect more fixes today. Sorry for the trouble Will.”

The right response, although Gundotra shouldn’t have limited it to “celebrities” and should have been more clear about the fixes and bugs.

An exasperated Robert Scoble was still dealing with the aftereffects late Thursday afternoon when he broadcast on Google+ and Twitter that Google+ Events was “The worst social launch ever. WTF were you thinking Google?” He called out Gundotra directly, adding a new twist:

Not only did it spam the crap out of my notifications and my Google+ events page but it added events — hundreds of them — onto my calendar.

My calendar is MINE. Not yours. You should NEVER put anything on it that I don’t approve of.

Scoble said declining the events didn’t make them disappear, requiring hundreds of entries to be deleted by one by one. It’s not the end of the world but it’s the kind of tech time sink that can frustrate to the point of a primal scream.

Google also is showing an Events opt-in screen on Google Calendar. I was in a rush when I first saw it and decided to adhere to a rule I’ve been trying to follow: don’t opt in if you don’t have time to read the fine print.

Even now, it’s difficult to see from the splash screen or the “learn more” page just how much noise you might be agreeing to if you opt in.

If you look at events through Google+ instead of your Google calendar, you can start to figure it out by choosing settings and scrolling around a lot. There is still no simple or direct way to set parameters specifically for events, as far as I can tell.

Google needs Google+ Events to work for a number of reasons: it encourages interaction between features like Google+, calendar and Gmail; it’s social so should bring more Google+ users together; it encourages photo sharing; and it should bring new users in.

If Google can manage the parachute-bike-rappel routine that wowed the Moscone Center crowd, someone there ought to be able to figure out how to introduce new features without alienating its users.

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Long-form content, of course, has been a fixture in the online video world for some time now — Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show, just as one example, launched back in 2009. But what we’re seeing now is the spread of longer runtimes into least-suspected places — such as YouTube.

Of the shows being funded by YouTube’s made-for-web initiative, many have pushed beyond the five-minute barrier, some notable examples including Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop (on the Geek and Sundry network) and the sitcom portion of the Fine Brothers’s MyMusic.

“I think our creators always wanted to make longer content — we’re just reaching a certain point in the lifecycle of online video where people have the command over the audience and the budget to make longer video,” YouTube Next Lab director Tim Shey said via phone. “More creators are building huge audiences on YouTube, and once you build a loyal audience online, they all tend to want more.”

Actor/producer Wilson Cleveland observed this first hand with his branded series Leap Year — which is why episodes of the show’s second season, premiering June 18th on Hulu, stretch out to 20 minutes or more. “We got so many comments and Tweets last season from fans wishing episodes were longer,” he said via email.

In addition, a longer runtime gave Cleveland and collaborators Vlad and Yuri Baranovsky more creative and advertising real estate: “Creatively, Vlad, Yuri and I wanted to tell deeper stories and develop these five characters, which longer episodes allow us to do. From [sponsor] Hiscox’s perspective, longer episodes provide more opportunities to appropriately showcase the brand around the show it sponsors.”

This Week In-esque The Lip.tv, which launched in December 2011 and will soon be joining The Young Turks network, is another company taking advantage of the web video world’s increased attention span, with five shows targeting niche subjects including wine, documentaries, and the media. Past guests have included Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, Courtney Love, Young Turks host Cenk Uygur, Bad Religion bassist Jay Bentley and actor/director Adrian Grenier.

While posting modest viewcounts for its episodes, which range from 40 to 50 minutes, “We get about 36 minutes out of most viewers, which we’re happy with,” CEO Michael Lustig said via phone. In addition, viewers who find archived episodes through search have a retention rate of 75 to 90 percent, which is why The Lip focuses on keeping its content evergreen.

“The whole argument about people being ADD is nonsense, and it’s not fair to them. We approach our audience as really smart, enlightened consumers, and they respond to that,” Lustig said.

Just because audiences are willing to watch longer content online, though, doesn’t mean that audience retention is any easier — an issue YouTube now addresses directly with the Audience Retention analytic, which breaks down peaks and drop-offs for every 10 seconds of the video. The newest edition of the YouTube Creator Handbook advises:

“Improve the format or pacing of your videos and find optimal video length by examining the graphs. Identify the parts of your videos that are most interesting to the audience (peaks), and at what points viewers fast-forward or abandon the video (drops) – these patterns will highlight needed changes to content and/or packaging.”

“It’s the ones who work the hardest to understand their audience who are the most successful,” Shey said.

Cleveland isn’t too concerned about Leap Year‘s ability to hold its audience, largely because of its primary hosting platform: “The Hulu audience is accustomed to watching longer videos and if they weren’t our primary partner, we may have thought twice about going longer.”

However, Leap Year will be using the YouTube annotation feature to “chapter” episodes posted there, allowing users to skip around within the video. I previewed the first episode on YouTube, and found that I was able to use the annotations to do things like skip past the show’s opening credit sequence and go back to previous chapters — as if I were watching the show on DVD.

The obvious truth about web content stretching in length is that services like Hulu and Netflix have conditioned viewers to watch for longer, using whatever device happens to be handy. “People are increasingly comfortable with iPads and iPhones to watch longer-form content — when you find something you love, it doesn’t matter how long it is,” Shey said.

“What’s encouraging to me is that the platforms are becoming networks funding their own original series,” Cleveland added (such as Netflix’s Lilyhammer or Hulu’s Battleground). “These series are on-par with the broadcast and cable fare audiences have already been comfortably consuming on these same platforms for years. THAT’s the marriage of TV and digital programming realized.”

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In a post on his blog, Wheaton wrote this week:

“Some ISPs are blocking all BitTorrent traffic, because BitTorrent can be used to share files in a piratical way. Hollywood lobbying groups are trying to pass laws which would force ISPs to block or degrade BitTorrent traffic, too. Personally, I think this is like closing down freeways because a bank robber could use them to get away.”

Wheaton’s reason for writing the post was his downloading of Ubuntu this past weekend. First, he tried to simply download it via HTTP from one of Ubuntu’s mirror servers, but the download was taking more than an hour. So Wheaton turned to the popular BitTorrent client Transmission, which allowed him to download the whole ISO file in about six minutes – something Wheaton called “an example of the usefulness of bittorrent for entirely legal purposes.”

Wheaton went on to write that he is often frustrated with the lack of understanding of Internet policy issues in the entertainment world:

“One of the things that drives me crazy is the belief in Hollywood that bittorrent exists solely for stealing things. Efforts to explain that this is not necessarily true are often met with hands clamped tightly over ears, accompanied by ‘I CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA.’”

Wheaton has been outspoken about issues of piracy and net neutrality before. Just in January, he blamed the entertainment industry’s insistence on DRM as the reason for piracy.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user ste3ve.

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When Google launched its Google+ social network, the company made it clear that it wasn’t just another Buzz-style experiment — director of product Bradley Horowitz said Google+ would become “part of everything” the company did. And over the past year or so we have seen a bit of what this means in practice, with G+ content being incorporated into search results and other services. But these attempts have also meant an almost inevitable clash between what Google wants and what users want. We got a glimpse of that on Wednesday with actor and author Wil Wheaton’s response to a change on YouTube. Is promoting Google+ worth it?

Wheaton, who has parlayed a starring role as the young ensign Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation into a career as an author, wrote on his widely-followed blog that when he went to give a video a “thumbs up” vote on YouTube, instead of the usual thumb icon that he used to see, there was a Google+ button. And hovering over the button showed a popup that asked him to “upgrade to Google+” before he could vote on the video (according to a comment from Google, it is testing different interfaces for YouTube votes including a Google+ button, but has not made a widespread change).

This incident sparked a rant from Wheaton about the web giant forcing users to log in to its network in order to simply vote on a video. But the outrage wasn’t driven by the actor and author’s desire not to use Google+ — in fact, he is a regular user, and an extremely popular one, with more than 1.3 million people including him in their Circles (the Google+ version of Twitter or Facebook lists). Instead, Wheaton said he was concerned that users who wanted to give his videos a “thumbs up” might refrain if they had to join yet another social network in order to do so. As he put it:

Oh, go f*** yourself, Google. This is just as bad as companies forcing me to “like” something on Facebook before I can view whatever it is they want me to “like.” Just let me thumbs up something, without forcing me to “upgrade” to G+, you ****heads.

Not everyone is happy with Google’s bandwagon jumping

The actor’s rant on his Tumblr blog was subsequently re-blogged (or shared) by over 2,000 users — including author Neil Gaiman, who added his own comment, saying he wished that “Google would leave the Social Network thing to others.” Although the company is capable of great things, said Gaiman, “when it rides bandwagons, it’s irritating. I’m not on Google Plus, and I suppose that I won’t be liking YouTube videos any longer.” And best-selling author John Green added a similar comment on his own Tumblr, saying:

Making it so that only Google Plus users can decide whether a YouTube video is worth watching benefits no one except for Google Plus: It is bad for viewers, bad for video creators, and bad for YouTube’s ability to curate and tailor videos to potential viewers.

The addition of Google+ voting buttons to YouTube videos no doubt seems like a natural extension of the network — one directly in line with the philosophy that Horowitz outlined last year, where Google+ becomes a “social layer” on top of everything the company does. And using YouTube as a way to promote the network as a destination and encourage users to sign up probably seems like a natural thing to do as well. But the response from Wheaton and Gaiman and others shows that some users are going to see it as an attempt to shove Google+ down their throats whether they want it or not.

There was a similar kind of response when Google added G+ content to its search results as part of its “Search Plus Your World” feature: critics (including us) complained that this was a breach of Google’s promise to its users that it would present an unbiased view of the world, and that it was effectively putting its thumb on the scales in order to promote its own network. And it seems to be doing more and more of this in an attempt to overcome the perception that there simply isn’t enough room in the market — or in most people’s online lives — for yet another social network.

Buttons on a YouTube video may seem like a relatively small thing to get so upset about, but it’s just one more lever that Google is using to try and push users into its network whether they want to go or not. Is that really the best way to get the kind of goodwill that a successful social network requires?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Robert S. Donovan and dutchmassive

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Now, Wil Wheaton, the noted geek, author, and Star Trek actor, wrote on his blog Thursday that he was working on the series. It’s unclear how much involvement he’s having, but it may not be major, as Wheaton apparently only heard about the project Wednesday and didn’t indicate he’ll be participating beyond the one day on Thursday.

Here’s Wheaton’s report:

The script arrived, I laughed myself silly, and called my manager back. “This is hilarious! There isn’t a single thing about this that I don’t like.”

“I knew you’d say that,” he said. “I’ll call them now and confirm you.”

. . . and that’s the story of how I got to work on Cavalcade this afternoon, where Seth Macfarlane complimented my beard and told me I was funny.

I am, without a doubt, the luckiest guy in this room right now.

Anyone else know anything else about Cavalcade? Let us know.

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