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Google Video’s Porn Problem
While Google is busily applying YouTube’s pop culture aegis to safe-for-work fare like politics and hip hop, the company seems content to allow also-ran Google Video to wallow in softcore smut.
Not a believer? Check the first few Google Video top 100 new videos, as delivered via RSS:
- Theo laughing at the Wii (195k views)
- Prostitute video (22k views)
- Beautiful girl kissing you with love (56k views)
- Bournemouth prostitute discusses her trade (114k views)
- First time online dating how to pickup dating sex (9k views)
The top 100 as seen on the Google Video site itself isn’t much better: Barbie Girl, Ainda te amo, Woman in Shower!!!, Guy pwned by girl and Girl caught by boyfriend. Some of the vids are lighthearted parody, but others, like two girls teach one another how to french kiss, are definitely lascivious.
Ashton Kutcher’s Latest Prank: Room 401, WTF
Among the many annoyingly-addictive gimmicks J.J. Abrams has helped loose upon the world — TV show cryptograms, mysterious movie trailers, Alias — is that inescapably virulent strain of marketing known as the interactive mystery. The latest show to employ the format, albeit without Abrams’ imprimatur: MTV’s Room 401, named after the hospital room where Harry Houdini died.
The show, EP’d by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg, is a reality series that pranks unsuspecting people with terrifying (but fake) situations: Crabs scuttling Alien-like out of a man’s chest at a sushi restaurant, a man who deep-fries his hand, a rat inside an arcade game, you get the idea. The show also contains, apparently, a series of easter eggs — subliminal messages by a doo-rag wearing Kutcher, directing videos toward an online mystery.
Hollywood Strike: Good for Online Video, Bad for UGC?
In an apparent attempt to earn even less money than they do now, Hollywood writers, long at loggerheads with studio execs over contract terms, might start jumping into the notoriously fickle online media marketplace once their contract terms expire. Hello frying pan. Meet the fire.
Screenwriters sat down with studio executives on Monday for contract talks centered around industry proposals to revamp the decades-old system by which television and film writers are paid extra when their work is released into reruns or onto DVDs. Currently writers aren’t paid for work that appears online or on wireless platforms. The contract for the 12,000+ members of the Writers Guild of America ends October 31. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is set to make a new proposal next week.
“The only place where a strike is good is the interactive business,” said Fox Interactive president Ross Levinsohn at an event covered by Variety. “The ability to create and distribute programming across the Internet and mobile is as simple as point-and-shoot.”
Diddy Looks for Personal Assistant via YouTube
When it comes to applying for a job with a music biz icon, nothing says “I’m qualified” like saying “I’ll be your b*tch.”
Just ask the kids responding to Diddy’s search for a personal assistant, which the hip hop impresario is conducting through YouTube:
Techies, Don’t Apologize for Stickam
What to make of the fact that Stickam, a site popular with young webcam users, is run by a Japanese porn magnate?
Here are the facts: The company that owns Stickam, Advanced Video Communications (AVC) owns and operates porn sites; Stickam has no advertising; Stickam has expensive office space; and a disgruntled employee with competitive business interests is concerned about child safety on the site.
Here are the allegations: Stickam employees deleted thousands of customer service e-mails; Stickam uses the same computer systems as other AVC sites that peddle porn.
The Creepy Side of YouTube Meetups
Saturday was a strange day. While the rest of the world was celebrating the global canonization of Al Gore, a flock of handycam-wielding YouTubers descended on Washington Square Park and busily navel-gazed their way into a me! me! me! orgy of giddy solipsism. At the park’s northern entrance the vid jockeys video’d each other, circling each other with cameras pointed like some retarded McLuhan version of a Reservoir Dogs standoff.
“I’m video-ing you! Now I’m video-ing you! You’re video-ing me? I’m video-ing you!” That’s a direct quote. Meanwhile police cameras whirred and clicked their own recordings, while a few members of the media interviewed the starry-eyed kids. A producer from HBO’s Runaway Box beckoned HappySlip, the YouTuber whose advert for the meetup garnered 2.7 million views, over for an interview.
YouTube Meetup in NYC Tomorrow
In what is an apparent attempt to convert Washington Square Park into a techno-hippie love-in of Haight-Ashbury proportions, hundreds (maybe thousands?) of video geeks will descend tomorrow into Greenwich Village, handycams in hand, for the first-ever New York YouTube Meetup.
If you keep tabs on the vid zeitgeist then you know the event — the latest such meetup, after a similar geeky bacchanalia in San Francisco earlier this year — from this video by Happy Slip, which has received over 2.6 million views since June 9 and reached as high as number 6 on the vidmeter index. Or maybe you heard of the meetup from this video. Or this video. Or this one. No shortage here. Really. I can keep going. See?
Europe Finds YouTube’s G-Spot
Really bored at work? Titillated by advertising masquerading as softcore porn? Really bored at work? Then check out the latest international YouTube phenomenon, an advertisement posted on the European Commission’s YouTube channel — a.k.a “EUTube,” a.k.a “Really? EwwTube? LOL” — which shows snippets of lovemaking from several award-winning European films.
The clip, entitled “Film Lovers Will Love This,” ends with a crescendo of orgasms and the double entendre “Let’s come together”.
44 seconds. 18 couples. 283,000 views. Congrats EU, you’ve found the Internet’s G Spot.
Technically, the video simply advertises the EU as a great place to film movies. But thanks to YouTube’s related videos function, it also serves as a gateway to less PG-13 fare. My favorite: Boob Shot! Runner-up: Stripping on the way to the NoHo pool.
It’s Revamp Week for Video Sites
How have vidshare sites changed this week? Let us count the ways:
- 1. Vimeo, the vidshare offspring of College Humor, launched a new version. The biggest change (besides lookin’ a whole lot more chill) is the addition of user-level privacy settings. You can choose which of your contacts sees your uploads. Granularity like this makes Vimeo more similar to a personal blogging tool like Vox than to YouTube. It’s good to see a vid site that’s more attuned to community than to broadcast. (See our Vimeo profile from April.)
- 2. Ad-and-lad-centric Heavy.com also rolled out some changes today, including a completely rebuilt video player that focuses on sequencing videos inside channels. Thus: If you’re browsing a curated channel, Heavy sequences the videos in that channel; once the first video ends, the next vid in that channel loads. Same goes for other areas like search results and most popular vids. Thumbnails for related videos are shown at the bottom of the player. A Heavy rep tells me they want to provide a continuous experience of related videos so the audience can relax with their finger off the mouse.
Heavy is also working on being more search engine friendly, so they’ve surfaced a lot of metadata outside the player.
Dove’s “Evolution” Web Vid Wins Top Ad Award
In what’s being touted as a milestone for web marketing, the viral phenomenon Dove “Evolution” advertisement won the Grand Prix at the 54th Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival this weekend.
For the three people and my dad who haven’t seen the vid: It’s a 74-second web-only affair, showing hairstylists and Photoshop artists manipulating an attractive woman into a flawless, airbrushed beauty. Its has been seen untold millions of times on YouTube and various vidshare sites. The Cannes judges awarded the top prize to “Evolution” after removing it from the corporate message category and placing it in film.
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