Entertainment
Vid-Biz: Fora.TV, Blinkx, Net Neutrality
Fora.TV Raises $4 Million; high-brow video aggregator closes Series A from William Randolph Hearst III, Adobe Ventures and others. (Beet.tv)
Blinkx Starts Content Management Service; the Advanced Media Platform automates content discovery, indexing, distribution and presentation on a publisher’s site. (MediaPost)
Congressional Panel Split on Net Neutrality; debate over the necessity of regulation falls along party lines. (Multichannel News)
DirecTV’s Income, Subscriber Base Grows; satellite TV company reports net income of $371 million and total subscriber base at 17 million. (The Wall Street Journal)
SAG Studio Talks Stall; digital still a sticking point between the two sides; rival actors’ union AFTRA begins talks today, expected to have deal in two weeks. (Variety)
YouTube India Launches; YouTube.in features partners including Zoom, UTV and Rajshri Group. (India Times)
Harland Williams Signs Deal with Koldcast TV; comedian will produce and act in 21 episodes of Unscrewed with Harland Williams, which will feature his stand-up routines. (release)
Masters Golf an Online Hole-in-One
Talk all you want about the online viewership stats for the NCAA basketball tournament — in my book, the Masters golf event is a much better workday time-waster, for several production and sport-inherent reasons.
If you don’t like golf or don’t care about Tiger Woods’ quest for the Grand Slam, I can’t help you there. But even casual followers of the sport should at least check out the live online coverage, especially the focused segments from “Amen Corner,” the famed stretch of holes #11, #12 and #13 at Augusta National. The widescreen option and excellent camera work — and did we mention no commercial breaks? — makes for a relaxing day of golf-coverage consumption while just an alt-tab away from real work. In my mind, golf is a better fit than basketball for the small screen since there is only one golfer to zoom in on (as opposed to 10 players), with more-predictable action for the cameras to follow. Plus the announcers give you handy audio cues (”here’s Tiger for birdie”) that allow you to switch from work in time to catch the onscreen action.
Midwest Teen Sex Show’s Nikol Hasler Twitters About Poop
Sex sells, especially on the Internet, but The Midwest Teen Sex Show brand of sex is in a class of its own. Where else can you find syphilis portrayed as a chainsaw-wielding murder or learn about the truth behind towel-snapping in the guys’ locker room?
We got to sit down with the show’s host and one of its creative minds when Nikol Hasler left behind the cow pastures and horny teenagers of Wisconsin to visit San Francisco, land of fewer cow pastures but equally horny teenagers. It was a casual chat, with the conversation swinging from her Twittering habits to her childrearing techniques to the fact that she very much wouldn’t want the show to be part of sex ed curriculum. Here are just a few highlights from the intelligently coquettish and inimitably colloquial Ms. Hasler.
Hasler told us that talks are already underway with television networks about moving the Midwest Teen Sex Show to the mainstream, but stressed that the TV execs all seem to understand that the show’s inherent irreverent edginess is key to its success. While the show is ostensibly aimed at teenagers, the audience is primarily of an older (sketchier?) demographic, but Hasler says they are still making sure that everything in the show is teenager appropriate. Hence their “Abstinence” brand of condoms.
Rickrolling: A Timeline
On April 1, Rickrolling became Public Enemy No. 1 to those devoted to serious Internet browsing. Since it’s always best to understand one’s enemy — and since tracking the evolution of this meme is a challenge worth undertaking — we thus present:
 |
Rickrolling: A Timeline
1969: First message is sent via ARPANET (precursor of the Internet).
1987: Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up hits Number 1 in the United Kingdom.
2005: YouTube lauches online.
June 20, 2006: First appearance of Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up video (as dubbed from VH1’s Pop-Up Video) appears on YouTube, uploaded by user belgianpassion. (As of April 2008, it has been viewed nearly 1.2 million times.)
Weekend Vid Picks: Your Week in PSAs
Good PSAs, with their short runtime and punchy conclusions, have always done well in the online video world. This week, an assortment of odd clips came together with nothing in common other than a desire to educate people on serious (and not-so-serious) matters.
Public Service Announcement: Test your awareness
Pushing viewers to examine the action on screen — all the action — this heavily circulated ad (reaching almost 2 million views on YouTube in two weeks) has a bit of a twist. But that just makes Transport for London’s message all the more effective.
Public Service Announcement: Jeff Zucker is…funny?
Starz to Sell on iTunes
Starz will launch on iTunes tonight, said Marc DeBevoise, SVP of business development and strategy for the production company, speaking at a panel at the Future of Television West conference in Hollywood.
DeBevoise said that consumers have demonstrated that they will buy content “as long as it feels like free,” attributing that idea to Fred Seibert of Next New Networks.
Food Fight: History as Told by Cuisine
Bratwurst assault destroys a population of fish and chips. Kebabs and lox bagels engage in a lethal standoff. And Vietnamese spring rolls face off against croissants and hamburgers. Food Fight, Stefan Nadelman’s epic short depicting the history of 20th century American warfare with food, uses computer-generated stop-motion techniques to depict real food engaged in deadly combat. And it’s racked up more than 1.5 million views in the two weeks it’s been on YouTube.
“Before and after the film was completed,” Nadelman writes on his web site, “the friends I screened it to fell into two camps: You Should Have Captions and You Shouldn’t Have Captions. I felt that if I added captions it would be too easy.” He made the right choice; the lack of captions inspires a level of engagement that enhances the film’s power. Without reading Nadelman’s cheat sheet, I didn’t immediately understand some moments, notably the kimchi and the Cuban sandwiches. But there are some beats — some battles — that require no context.
Ninja to Hang Up His Mask?
When do you kill the one-trick pony? Kent Nichols, in a blog post about he and partner Douglas Sarine’s deal to write and direct a new version of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, says he sees the duo’s signature three-year-old project, Ask a Ninja, tapering off.
Nichols writes that he and Sarine have committed again to ad-seller Federated Media to produce their “weekly-ish” show for the next year, and will release their Ask a Ninja: The Ninja Handbook.
After that contract? Who knows. We love the ninja and we want to be a part of our lives for a long time to come. But at the end of that term it will have been over three years since Ask A Ninja has been in production and over four since we’ve been writing ninja-related things. I’m sure we’ll take a bit of a break (at least in terms of producing weekly-ish). We’ll definitely keep the archive online and hopefully the fansite will continue to thrive. And there’s always the Ninja movie…
Dear Comcast, Why Is My DVR So Dumb?
At the risk of sounding like an infomercial…”Has this ever happened to you?” You set your Comcast DVR to record only new episodes of your favorite TV series, but it winds up recording every…single…showing, including all repeats? The problem is especially bad with a show like Project Runway, which Bravo seems to run on a continuous loop, clogging my DVR and requiring constant deleting. So I called Comcast to find out what the problem is. Turns out there are two main reasons, and neither of them are really excusable.
 |
The first concerns the cable provider’s Interactive Programming Guide (IPG), the TV listing you interact with as a Comcast subscriber. It’s called the i-Guide and it was developed by Comcast and Gemstar-TV Guide.
Networks provide all the data about each show for the i-Guide to Gemstar-TV Guide — things like episode synopses and whether each airing is new or a repeat. But sometimes networks forget to provide this information, which means your DVR can’t differentiate between what’s new and what’s old. “[The networks] are not malicious, not irresponsible, they just haven’t provided this data historically,” Todd Walker, Comcast senior vice president of product management, told me. Walker said that when a network is alerted to the missing data, they are generally quick to fix it. (A Bravo spokesperson assured me that it provides all the correct data to its cable partners.)
Family Guy, Family Ties Stars Head for Web
In the last day we’ve heard of two more web video projects from established Hollywood talent. Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy is making a web show for Google, and actress Justine Bateman (Family Ties), writer and producer Jill Kushner (The Ellen DeGeneres Show), Peter Murrieta (Wizards of Waverly Place), and Alan Sereboff (Snowblind) have started a web video site called FM78.tv.
MacFarlane has cleared his digital work directly with the Writers Guild of America. “He’s doing a series of webisodes called Cavalcade, original programming that’ll be distributed through some Google portal,” was the word from WGA West President Patric Verrone, whom I met at a Harvard conference yesterday (we’ll post video from that interview tonight).
Sponsor Gallery
Recent
GigaOM Network
© 2008 The GigaOM Network. Powered by WordPress.com. Marketing consulting by ACS.
