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With YouTube just about to celebrate its 7th anniversary (quick, everyone send socks to San Bruno!), it makes sense to look at one of the more ambitious series to come out of its recent Made For Web initiative: The Fine Brothers’ MyMusic, a sitcom surrounded by a feast of auxiliary content.
The Fine Brothers have a long-established reputation for trying new things with web content, from experimenting with interactive YouTube games to creating a whole fake social network to support a series about social media profiles. And this year, they’re using YouTube’s money to create not just a show, but a fully immersive social media experience — as well as not one but three show-within-a-shows.
The premise of MyMusic is relatively simple: The primary series, an Office-esque sitcom, charts the wacky antics of a transmedia production company focused on music, shot in semi-regular blocks.
On top of that, though, there are three side series being produced every week: The Mosh, an interactive Q&A series, music news show MyMusic News, and a live variety show featuring comedians and musicians (past guests include The Jezebels and Rhett and Link).
Each show is hosted by at least one of the show’s characters, who also have vibrant social media profiles across a minimum of three social networks — each. Between Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and Twitter, that’s a total of 25 profiles, each being updated multiple times daily. According to co-creator Benny Fine via IM, there are over 40,000 people following the characters and the company on services outside of YouTube.
Making it happen, said co-creator Benny Fine via IM, are 11 full-time staffers “wearing many hats,” including two full-time writers whose duties include the social media element.
“To do this ambitious project with three weekly shows you need manpower, and it’s still not enough,” Fine added. To accomodate the demanding production schedule, the Brothers have had to scale back on their other series, including Kids React and Spoilers.
The cast includes a mix of TV-born and web-born talent, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer villain Adam Busch and My Damn Channel It Girl Grace Helbig. “We really wanted a mix of more traditional TV actors to mix in with YouTube talent, continually wanting to show talent is talent no matter where it originates,” Fine said.
Along the theme of mixing TV and web styles: The comedy component of MyMusic is released as short-form episodes every Sunday. But then, once every seven weeks, the preceding episodes will be cut together as a TV sitcom-length catch-up episode — certain scenes will even be reshot to make sure that the catch-up episode works as a seamless experience.
Thus, by the end of MyMusic‘s 49-week first season, the team will have created a six-episode season of a TV series, “written in a way to have the content fully work as a web series or a sitcom,” Fine said. “We’re the only one in [the Made For Web] initiative, to our knowledge, making a full-on sitcom.”
Since the show’s launch a month ago, the MyMusic channel has racked up over 2.2 million views across all its various series. Is that enough to be considered a success? The Fine Brothers are torn. According to Rafi Fine, “Views are one thing, but who’s to say what number makes advertisers come on board, make YouTube happy and make a sustainable business to keep the show going?”
But for Benny, “Having 100,000 views an episode or more, all year long, for a scripted show online is not something that’s really been done. And being able to see the tens of thousands that are so engaged with this world — that’s success to me as an artist.”
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Digital media companies like YouTube and Yahoo have yet to see how much they will have increased their ad base by upping the quality of their video content recently.
But as monthly video data released by comScore shows, both companies have managed to significantly increase the amount of time viewers spend watching video on their respective channels.
Also read: TV nets wrap upfront week: “The biz still goes through us”
According to comScore, viewers spent an average of 434.8 minutes in April watching video on Google channels, a grouping the mainly includes the assets of YouTube. That represents an uptick of 55 percent over April 2011.
On Yahoo channels, meanwhile, viewers spent an average of 73.7 minutes in April watching video, nearly double the 37.5 minutes they averaged in April 2011.
While time spent viewing these leading digital channel operators has increased dramatically, total unique viewers watching them has not.
Tabulating 157.7 million unique video users in April, Google sites experienced only an 11 percent increase over April 2011′s tally of 142.7 million.
Yahoo, meanwhile, was virtually flat, counting 53.6 million uniques in April compared to 53.2 million during the same period last year.
These year-over-year benchmarks for the leading internet video providers follow trend lines of the broader online video industry.
For the entire online video universe, comScore tabulated 180.8 million unique viewers in April, up just 5 percent over April 2011. However, total minutes spent watching online video increased 46 percent to an average of 1,307.7 (I know, who are the people with all this time who are top-weighting these averages?).
Even with the uptick in consumption, YouTube and Yahoo’s rise in usage has come at a cost to others.
Vevo traffic continues to slide
Music video giant Vevo, for example, saw its unique viewers plummet 10 percent to 49.5 million over the same period, while its average viewership time declined by 41 percent to 57.9 minutes. (The comScore report doesn’t track mobile usage, so it’s hard to tell how many viewers are migrating to mobile platforms.)
Also, Viacom digital, the leader among traditional media companies in the digital video realm, saw its average viewer time drop 27 percent to 58.9 minutes (unique viewers were flat year over year at 41.2 million).
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It’s still mum on how its subscription base in Japan is developing, but Hulu did confirm that it has hired a new managing director to run its operations in the region, Buddy Marini.
Previously heading Avex Asia Limited, a Hong Kong-based subsidiary of Japanese entertainment conglomerate Avex Group, Marini (pictured) will report to Hulu senior VP of international Johannes Larcher. He’ll lead all strategy and operations for Hulu’s business in Japan, which opened shop in September.
A Hulu representative would not respond to our queries as to how this would change Hulu Japan’s executive infrastructure other than to say he’s reporting to Larcher.
Marini, who oversaw Asian film investment for Avex, started his career in the U.S., working as an agent trainee for Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor and later as a creative executive for Universal Pictures.
So what’s he walking into? Tough to say, since Hulu is reluctant to release usage data on the region.
Last month, the streaming video company announced that it had lowered its subscription price in Japan from ¥1480 (about $18.20) to ¥980 ($12.10).
While not offering an update on its Japanese operations, a Hulu rep said the company has increased its content partnerships to 21 from the six it had in the region at launch. Also, the estimated number of devices in Japan that are “Hulu-enabled” has reached 29 million.
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Details of the new venture are still hard to come by. But the new streaming service being jointly launched in August by Verizon and Redbox seems clearly intended to compete with over-the-top services like Netflix, and not so much meant to further the TV Everywhere goals of Verizon FiOS.
“This is going after some FiOS customers, but this is really meant for the launch across the United States to the Redbox population and their 30 million customers,” said Verizon chief financial officer Fran Shammo Thursday morning, speaking in Boston at the 40th annual J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference.
Also read: A new ‘stream team’: Verizon and Redbox take on Netflix
Shammo said Verizon’s impetus for the joint venture was not so much to transition video content licensed for the fiber-optic-fueled FiOS’ roughly 4.4 million subscribers, a la TV Everywhere, “but to expand our capability outside FiOS’ footprint.”
As for the Redbox footprint, it’s actually much bigger than 30 million. With Coinstar conducting a separate financially oriented event Thursday, “analyst’s day,” its Redbox unit tallied nearly 39 million customers at the end of the first quarter.
It’s about to take over the 10,000 Blockbuster Express kiosk locations it acquired in February. And the company has plans to expand into Cananda, the third biggest disc-rental market in the world.
As for the streaming venture, Shammo said it will showcase Verizon’s new proprietary digital distribution platform, Verizon Digital Media Services (VDSM), which he believes has advantages over the content delivery networks utilized by Netflix and Hulu.
“Utilizing that backbone, we’re able to deliver content at a much cheaper rate than people out there today,” Shammo said.
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Michael Spiegelman, Netflix's director of product innovation for the Website and Tablet, announced on the company blog that they updated the web player for Windows and the Mac.
- The size of the controls now scales, making it easier to use the player on large screens, for example if you connect your computer to your TV
- Similarly, the player will scale down to smaller windows, which is useful if you want to watch something while working in another window. Also, the video now stretches to the full window in the browser
- Full screen mode now has all the features of browser mode so you can view season/episode information and change to the next episode when watching a TV show
- Pausing the video now shows more information about the title
Spiegelman also posted an image to explain the new icons (see large size).
What do you think of the changes?
Netflix's ex-VP of Communications Steve Swasey announced that he has joined online gaming company Kabam.
After seven extraordinary years at Netflix, during which time we built the brand to become an iconic household name, I've accepted the position of Vice President of Corporate Communications at a young company you may not know -- but soon will. Kabam is a leader in free-to-play online games for serious players. As Kabam is based in the Bay Area, I'm sticking to my California roots and not relocating as I would have for some of the other companies I was considering.
In many ways, Kabam reminds me of a very young Netflix. It's populated with incredibly smart and passionate people, including the co-founder CEO, who have a vision for changing consumer behavior through the internet. Further, Kabam already has a strong and growing international customer base.
ArsTechnica reports that there will now be two unskippable piracy notices on DVD's and Blu-ray discs, even if we PAY for the discs.
The idea isn't to deter current pirates, apparently (the new scheme requires all legal purchasers to sit through 20 seconds of warnings each time they pop in a film, but will be totally absent from pirated downloads and bootlegs). It's to educate everyone else. As ICE Director John Morton announced in a statement yesterday, "Law enforcement must continue to expand how it combats criminal activity; public awareness and education are a critical part of that effort."
This is almost as annoying as that loud piracy commercial they used to ship on discs.
I'm wondering if the new notices will drive more people to piracy.
Dan Rayburn at the StreamingMeidaBlog has put together a comparison chart of the popular streaming devices including the Apple TV, Boxee, Roku, Tivo, Sony, Vizio and more (PDF).
