It looks like we are finally finishing the gauntlet of web series awards now that the nominees for this year’s Webby awards have been released, and amazingly The Guild isn’t nominated this time. There’re an almost ridiculous number of awards at the Webby’s (I didn’t count but I’d say at least 100) broken up into 4 categories: Website, Online Film & Video, Interactive Advertising, and Mobile.
For the sake of brevity let’s just look at the nominees in the Online Film & Video category specifically related to web series.
By the same production team that makes Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diary, is this Larry Sander’s style show about behind the scenes of a fictional 11 o’clock newscast.
The video complement to the Onion which is getting to be just as amusing as the print version. If you’ve never heard of The Onion before just click the link, you’ll be glad you did.
Made by Big Fat Brain (one of the many content creators that produce work for My Damn Channel) comes brilliant take on DIY instructional videos, but narrated by angry/sad guy in a failing marriage. This is one of the best new online comedy series in a long time.
A sci-fi series where overnight all electrical technology dies and 99% of the human population goes missing. I’ve heard great things about this series but have never been able to get into it due to the CGI static still style animation.
Commissioned by the Pennsylvania tourism office is this bizarre, but kind of adorable, series where the Punxsutawney groundhog’s shadow feels guilty about causing six more weeks of summer and runs away. The series consists of the groundhog's journey to find his shadow and return to Punxsutawney before Feb 2nd
The Lonelygirl15 spin-off set in London. Generally considered the better show, but for some reason I never find myself watching it. It is also currently nominated for two BAFTA awards.
The classic story of guy meets girl, girl has a rare trait in her blood, guy loses girl when she is kidnapped by a secret society that wants to use her blood to help extend its members lives and guy seeks revenge.
Described as an urban western, this series is simply fantastic and you are doing yourself a great disservice if you haven’t checked it out yet.
Both My Damn Channel and LG15 Studios have had a great year by getting nominated twice in their categories. Also this year My Damn Channel has picked up a YouTube Best Series nomination and LG15 Studios has earned two BAFTA nominations.
A couple other web series that I noticed nominated in other categories are: PINK - Webisode 07 "Feels Like The First Time" for Drama: Individual Episode, Street Fighter: The Later Years, part 5 for Comedy: Individual Short or Episode, and Drawn by Pain for Best Use of Animation/Motion Graphics.
At the Weddy Awards website you can check out all the nominees and honorees and vote for the people’s choice awards (registration required). Voting closes May 1st.
Ok, well maybe Jess didn’t land a job reprising her role of Bree in a television version of Lonelygirl15, but she is starring in the upcoming web series Blood Cell, a new horror-thriller from 60Frames Entertainment, directed by Eduardo Rodriguez. Jessica is mostly known for her comic goofy characters such as Bree (Lonelygirl15) and Jen (Greek), but she has tried her hand at the horror genre before… but not with a lot of success.
Her first film was the Razzie-winning I Know Who Killed Me, a film so bad that even Jess couldn’t speak well of it when she was chatting with fans on IRC a few weeks back. It is hard to assume Blood Cell will be a huge step up, considering the plot is basically the same as the forgettable 2004 film Celluar. Jess plays Julia, who gets a late-night call from her BFF who tells her she's been kidnapped and if Julia's phone loses its signal her captor will kill her.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the series, but even if it does turn out to be a stinker, at least it is only 18 episodes long, so we won’t have to sit through 255 episodes to see if she will live or die. Check out the trailer below, and you can sign up for email updates from the official site.
The LA Times quoted 60Frames CEO Brent Weinstein as saying "It's not just comedy, thrillers can work, dramatic series can work -- this is something that we think really can prove that there's an audience out there." Although, I might be a tad cynical about how well this horror series will work out, I completely agree with the sentiment. It seems like in the world of web series just about every genre other than comedy is seriously lacking and I’m excited to see that is starting to change.
Based on information gathered from public sources in recent weeks, plus confidential informants, Anchor Cove has learned that the Creators of Lonelygirl15 (Miles Beckett, Greg Goodfried, and Amanda Goodfried) are set to soon announce groundbreaking news: A new partnership with America On-Line and the ABC network to broadcast new online shows exclusively on the internet channel "EQAL."
BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!
The EQAL channel will be a "farm league" for potential future network shows, and will soon grow to include many new shows. That development model will start with the announcement that "Lonelygirl15" will debut as a new series on TV on the ABC network this fall, with Jessica Rose reprising her role as "Bree."
For Your Imagination, the online video production company responsible for Yahoo! Best Web Series nominee Break a Leg as well as close to a dozen other series, announced today that they had raised $1 million in seed funding from ConsensusOne Ventures. In January 2007 ConsensusOne first invested $1 million and along with this addition investment they are helping For Your Imagination work on a round of Series A funding.
For Your Imagination CEO Paul Kontonis told NewTeeVee today that the company’s gross revenue last year was $350,000 while their net expenses were $850,000, but that one of their series DadLabs is close to breaking even and that the rest of the company is showing growth.
With other web video production and distribution companies such as Next New Networks, ON Network, and Revision3 all already having found venture capital, as well as unconfirmed rumors that the producers of lonelygirl15 might be looking for venture capital to expand under the name EQAL, it seems just about everyone is trying to become a major player in the online video world and there is no lack of investors to try and make that happen. I just hope some of these companies can figure out how to monetize their content, because the last thing we need is another online bubble bursting.
Well, technically, but only in the television craft section, which to those unfamiliar with the BAFTA’s is kind of like the equivalent of the Scientific and Technical Awards at the Academy Awards. They are hosted on a different night than the BAFTA Television Awards and don’t receive quite as much attention. Still though, it is an impressive accomplishment and it's interesting that these very mainstream awards are starting to honour web series. I believe the Emmys this year will have a category for web series as well.
KateModern has been nominated for Interactive Innovation – Content as well as Interactive Innovation – Service/Platform. Confusingly, Bebo is also nominated for Interactive Innovation – Service/Platform and since it is the service/platform that KateModern uses it would seem that Bebo has an awfully good chance, one way or another, of walking away with that award. Previous BAFTA Television Craft awards winners for Interaction Innovation include Four Docs, a site where people can watch and upload documentaries, and no one else since 2006 was the first year BAFTA handed out awards for interactivity.
KateModern is also having a special event next weekend. On April 5th they will be releasing 12 videos in 12 hours, similar to the 12in12 event Lonelygirl15 had and which marked the end of the first season and the death of Bree, the show’s main character. Kate, the main character from KateModern, was killed sometime ago and this 12in12 event promises to reveal who her killer was. I guess the moral of the story is if you are trying to land a role in a LG15 Studios production just make sure the series isn’t named after your character.
First The Guild won a SXSW Greenlight Award, just hours ago YouTube announced that they also won the 2007 YouTube Video Award for Best Series, and with only a few hours of voting left it looks like they will pick up the Yahoo! Video Award for Best Series as well. One can only hope that these wins will help them in their pursuit to find a production partner and no longer have to rely entirely on fan donations to fund the show.
If you recall the other day I posted about how Break a Leg was closing the gap in the voting for the Yahoo! Video Award, well it turns out having some connections in old media, can help you in new media.
Nathan Fillion, who will be co-starring with Felicia Day in Joss Whedon’s upcoming internet musical Dr. Horribles Sing-Along Blog, posted a bulletin on his MySpace encouraging people to check out and vote for The Guild. Seeing that he has over 43,000 friends on MySpace it is unsurprising that this last minute campaigning was enough to help The Guild re-establish their lead, and almost certainly win.
By now everyone knows the story of Quarterlife. Originally developed as a TV pilot by Marshall Herskovitz, but when it was not picked up it was redesigned to be released as a web series. Then there was the looming writers strike and before a single episode of Quarterlife aired online Marshall Herskovitz had already inked a deal to move the show back to TV, where it promptly failed and was cancelled. While everyone was falling over themselves to come up with the most witty way to describe how poorly Quarterlife had done as a television series, they tended to miss that besides Quarterlife two other web series are going to be making the move to TV – and they didn’t get their deals until after they had found an audience online.
After the very one sided start, who would have thought, that with only a couple days left, the Yahoo! Video Awards would have become a really close and exciting race with only no clear winner yet, and everyone tossing out claims of cheating. At first I made fun of the fact that the Yahoo! was using an open voting system where people could view the results before voting themselves, but this has led to some great campaigning by the different shows as they see how far behind or ahead they are.
The campaigning started off pretty tame with all the shows posting on their respective blogs to try and rally their fans to come out and vote for them. The Guild with its WoW (World of Warcraft) following had many posts by fans in the countless WoW forums encouraging people to vote for the show. This grassroots effort, combined with a video from The Guild asking fans to vote, resulted in them racing far out in front and getting more votes than all other series combined.
Even though they were very far behind in the polls Break a Leg didn’t give up. First they offered to include the name of anyone that votes for them (you have to email them after voting) in a special thanks section on their next video as well as releasing a song containing the names of everyone that votes for them. This helped them close the gap a little bit, but it wasn’t until they created a video killing off Felicia Day, star of The Guild, that they jumped out in front and took away The Guild's lead for the first time.
The lead has been swinging back and forth the past few hours and it is hard to predict a winner. Currently, the Guild has 8555 (50% of the vote) and Break a Leg has 7479 (44% of the vote).
Well it seems like web series award season is upon us. The Guild just won at the Greenlight Awards this week and next month we have the Webbys to look forward to, but to fill that otherwise awardless gap there are both the 2nd annual YouTube Video Awards and the 2008 Yahoo! Video Awards.
First up let’s take a look at the YouTube Video Awards. The voting started on March 13th and continues until the 19th allowing people to vote once a day. Allowing people to vote upwards to 7 times seems pretty far from the ideal method to judge videos, but this multiple voting can’t be any worse than the usual day-to-day gaming that goes on with YouTube stats.
Not only is the voting method questionable, there are also real problems with the layout again this year. While it is easy to watch the episode they have selected to represent the show, it can be a real pain the rest of the series if you want to watch more.
It seems like justabouteveryone has an article about AOL acquiring Bebo for $850 million. But is the third place social networking site worth that much? And when I say third place I mean very clearly third place. Venturebeat, using numbers from Hitwise, discovered that “MySpace’s share of US Internet visits was 67 times larger compared with Bebo, and Facebook’s share of US Internet visits was 11 time that of Bebo in Feb-08.”
As a social networking site Bebo is lagging very far behind, but as a video distribution site it is doing very well. It has the popular original web series KateModern which has apparently pulled in 35 million views so far (although I’d claim having every episode featured on the Bebo homepage has inflated those numbers significantly and the show’s dedicated audience is far smaller) and two new web series due to premiere very soon. The first of these is Sofia’s Diary which is based on the Portuguese web and mobile series of the same name launched in 2003. The other new series is The Gap Year, which sounds to me a lot like Where The Hell Is Matt, but with less goofy dancing.
Along with a strong lineup of original series, Bebo also signed deals last week with many big name UK television networks, such as BBC, Channel 4, BSkyB and MTV, to allow some of their content to be broadcast on Bebo for free.
Consider some stats for a moment. These seem to indicate a decline in interest for social networking sites and a rise for video sharing ones, more specifically that 29% of adult internet users watch online videos and 19% visit social networking sites with the same frequency. Also when looking at the year-over-year growth rate video streaming sites are also beating social networking sites as they grew by 123% while social networking sites only saw 46% growth.
So even though Bebo will likely not be able to overtake MySpace as a social networking site, it mayjust be able to overtake it as an online video distribution site, and in the long term that might turn out to be the far more important battle to win.
