
When I started writing about the streaming video business for StreamDaily in late 2013, most industryites and mainstream journalists still thought of YouTube as an outlet for cute cat videos, and if you'd have suggested to anyone outside of Netflix that it would soon be challenging both the TV networks and the movie studios, they would've looked at you like you had one of those cats dancing on your head.
It's hard to blame them for not seeing it coming. In early 2014, it was a challenge to scrounge up five relevant stories a day to fill out StreamDaily's newsletter. But by the time I became Managing Editor of VideoInk in the summer of 2015, streaming news was pouring in so fast and furious, it was hard to keep up with the deluge. You didn't want to turn away for a moment out of fear you'd miss another game-changing development.
Today, social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat have joined OTT players (Netflix, Amazon and Hulu) in the massing army of broadcast TV killers, and there is constant chatter about cord-cutters, cord-nevers and skinny bundles, mobile-first, digital influencers and branded content, and linear television reach vs. online audience engagement. Constant flux is the new normal.
Below are a selection of features I wrote for VideoInk and StreamDaily documenting the changes wrought by the streaming video revolution.
It's hard to blame them for not seeing it coming. In early 2014, it was a challenge to scrounge up five relevant stories a day to fill out StreamDaily's newsletter. But by the time I became Managing Editor of VideoInk in the summer of 2015, streaming news was pouring in so fast and furious, it was hard to keep up with the deluge. You didn't want to turn away for a moment out of fear you'd miss another game-changing development.
Today, social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat have joined OTT players (Netflix, Amazon and Hulu) in the massing army of broadcast TV killers, and there is constant chatter about cord-cutters, cord-nevers and skinny bundles, mobile-first, digital influencers and branded content, and linear television reach vs. online audience engagement. Constant flux is the new normal.
Below are a selection of features I wrote for VideoInk and StreamDaily documenting the changes wrought by the streaming video revolution.
While Hollywood Squabbles, YouTube Has #NoFilter on Diversity
In the film and TV world, diversity is dictated from the top down by executives who greenlight the projects and the writers and the producers they hire to craft the stories. This means we are left with content that largely reflects the inhabitants of show business executive suites, which tend to be white males. These execs also tend to be lawyers, MBAs and/or sociopaths, but that’s another topic.
In the social video space, individual users greenlight their own no-budget projects, and they’re surfaced organically, without corporate sponsorship or promotion, by the fans. By the time the show business machinery gets its claws on the creators, they are already stars with fully-developed personas and massive followings. The differences don’t end there ... Lesbians, Vampires & Kotex: How 'Carmilla' Became a Branded Digital Series Sensation
When a brand sponsors a series, it goes without saying that the show’s themes must be compatible with the product it purports to promote. So one can’t help but wonder what the folks at U by Kotex were thinking when they signed on to back “Carmilla.”
Executive producer Jay Bennett admits that many have questioned the weird mix of images conjured up by the brand/story combination (tampons, blood and vampires), but not U by Kotex... |
Because It's Facebook, Stupid: Why Facebook Live is Important or 1.59B Users Can't Be Wrong
At Facebook Live’s big features roll-out in Hollywood, a video screen played Tastemade’s 55-minute live stream of a pair of a hands drawing faces on the creamy surface of a cup of coffee latte with a toothpick, while members of the media roamed the room with their smart phones, eagerly live streaming to what were likely non-existent audiences.
The message of the day was “this is the next big thing, you have to try it,” but it felt as an unhip as Mom’s awkward post about sexting on your timeline … How Talent Agencies Are Changing the Streaming Biz
WME agent Chris Jacquemin remembers what it was like when he first started repping digital native talent back in the old days of the streaming video industry – you know, the early 2010s.
YouTubers had been making their own deals, and "they were a bit shocking," says Jacquemin, whose clients include top digital influencers such as Grace Helbig, The Fine Bros., Felicia Day, Lilly Singh and Cameron Dallas. The multi-channel networks were typically taking 50% of their AdSense revenue (after Google had already taken its 45% cut) and 80% on brand deals. They were also demanding aggressive splits on ownership of the content and control of distribution rights, as well as requiring talent to promote products or services in which the MCNs had a vested interest. "It occurred to us that it really wasn't being managed like a marketplace," says Jacquemin. |
How Disney XD Scored with a Live Snapchat Promotion
For 17-year-old Jake Webber, it was an adventure. He was flown from his home in Kansas last month to join his friends and fellow Vine stars Sam Golbach and Colby Brock for a live-streamed Mario Kart 8 tournament at YouTube Space LA promoting the launch of Disney XD’s new series “The Gamer’s Guide to Pretty Much Everything.”
All Webber had to do was make posts on Snapchat about the goings-on — something the average teen in this situation would probably be doing anyway — and he got paid to do it. For the pros at Disney XD, it was a frightening leap into the unknown ... Finding Grace at the Hollywood & Silicon Valley Intersection
When Kathleen Grace first came on board as chief creative officer at New Form Digital, she had some advice for her new bosses. She told them that in the digital space, they couldn’t linger in development, Hollywood-style. They needed to move fast.
Having spent 3 years as head of creative development for YouTube Space LA, Grace had the experience to back her words. But New Form’s owners – which include Imagine Entertainment’s Ron Howard and Brian Grazer and Discovery Communications – know a thing or two about the business themselves. “Luckily, my very intelligent backers said, ‘Great. Here’s some money – go!'” recalls Grace. |
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YouTube Space LA Comes of Age
In Aug. 2015, CBS’ “The Late Late Show with James Corden” packed up its set and its band and took it twelve and a half miles down the freeway to YouTube Space LA in Playa Vista to record a special edition of the talker.
The stated purpose was to celebrate a decade of YouTube, but the telecast effectively served as the national TV coming out party for the facility where, as YouTube puts it, creators come to “learn, connect and create.” “The Late Late Show” averages 1.37 million viewers nightly. That’s a far cry from the 25 people who showed up for YouTube Space LA’s first Thursday night happy hour gathering in early 2013 ... No Sleep for the 'Pretty Things' Crew
Spoiler alert: Maker Studios’ first scripted series Oh, You Pretty Things, premiering Monday on the YouTube channel The Platform and Maker.tv, opens with the smashing of a guitar.
Within 7 seconds, viewers are introduced to the lead character Olivia, a fashion photographer’s assistant and music blogger played by Francesca Eastwood (pictured above with Alexander Nifong and Tui Asau). In less than a minute, she’s getting reamed out by her boss. The slam-bang opening is no mere dramatic flourish. Zefr Preaches Salvation in Analytics
Zefr co-founder and co-CEO Richard Raddon has the warm, friendly demeanor of a small town pastor. But instead of the word of God, he preaches salvation in analytics.
For Zefr, YouTube provides the gospel. Every 60 seconds, 300 hours of video is added to the platform, which in turn generates billions of views each day, along with a massive wealth of information about its users. Zefr employs its proprietary technology to help customers from Hollywood to Madison Ave. locate YouTube content containing their IP, monetize it, and use the data it gleans to market their products efficiently with hyper-targeted campaigns. “If am a shoe company, I can target all the videos where users are unboxing shoes or, if I’m a yogurt company, I can target everybody who’s talking about wellness on the platform,” said Raddon, who shares the title of co-founder and co-CEO with business partner Zach James. “There’s so much content being uploaded to YouTube, it has a breadth of content that we believe will be unparalleled by any other platform out there, now and in the future.” How Meghan Camarena Beat YouTube Burnout
Upon hearing that Meghan Camarena (a.k.a. Strawburry17) has a new fall season of shows, debuting today, the initial instinct is to marvel at the fact that the online video ecosystem has become so built-out and sophisticated that an individual YouTube star can adopt the programming strategy of a television network.
But for Camarena it’s more than just a smart, mature business move. It’s a matter of survival. |
NewFronts in Rearview Tell Us Don't Believe the Hype
The go-big, promise-them-everything strategy is common with the media companies presenting at the NewFronts in New York... and so are the results.
Pick a programming slate unveiled at [the previous] year's events and google some of the titles. Often, you’ll find that the only mentions of the programs are articles relating to the original announcement ... Meet Susanne Daniels, the Force Behind YouTube Originals
Five years ago, if Susanne Daniels had abandoned the comfort and prestige of a well-established cable brand for an enterprise built on homemade videos of cute cats, juvenile pranks, snarky slackers playing video games and teens and twentysomethings staring into the camera, sharing the minutiae of their personal lives, people probably would’ve said she was crazy — maybe even to her face.
But it wasn’t five years ago. It was last July. And ever since Disney bought multi-channel network Maker Studios in March 2014 in a deal worth up to $950 million, traditional media players have been in a mad rush to establish a beachhead on the streaming video landscape. They realize something exciting and powerful is happening on YouTube ... even if they still don’t quite understand what it is or what to do with it. So it makes sense to hear Daniels say that when she told her industry peers she was leaving her post as president of programming at MTV to join YouTube in the newly-created role of VP of YouTube Originals, effective in the fall of 2015, “people reacted like I’d won the lottery.” The Skinny on Defy Media' s Big Plans
It’s a mid-January afternoon on a dark sound stage at Defy Media’s Beverly Hills office, and the team behind the company’s new internet entertainment magazine show Totally Clevver is buzzing about their red carpet triumph the night before at the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards.
Although Clevver received its share of snubs (thanks for nothing, Matthew McConaughey), it got five minutes with Oprah Winfrey and co-host Traci Stump f convinced Saving Mr. Banks star Emma Thompson to give a dramatic reading of the lyrics to Beyoncé’s Drunk in Love (sample line: “I get filthy when that liquor get into me”). No, this is not your father’s entertainment television news. That’s the point. Kind of. Film Schools Feeding the Hunger for Online Content
For decades, film schools around the globe have been churning out exponentially more graduates than the entertainment industry has the capacity to employ. Enter the rapidly-growing online video business, with its insatiable need for content and the young, eager, inexpensive talent to make it. It’s not hard to see the potential for mutually beneficial relationships.
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Why Young Hollywood Said 'No' to Cable and 'Yes' to OTT
Young Hollywood CEO R.J. Williams was six months into negotiations with a major media conglomerate on a deal that would give his celebrity-obsessed, millennial-targeted digital brand its own 24/7 linear TV cable channel.
Tech meetings were held and a programming grid was being assembled. Then, after repeated delays, the deal finally fell apart. Frustrated, Williams turned his attention to over-the-top video. He saw a platform with a low barrier of entry and no pre-ordained hour or half-hour formats, where content can be ad-supported, subscription or both, and take whatever form the channel owner desires. And it can be consumed by viewers on big screens in their living rooms, just like broadcast and cable TV. “That was sort of the light-bulb moment,” said Williams ... I explore the wonders of Vine, the Twitter-owned video app that's putting a surreal spin on online video sharing, with company co-founder Colin Kroll .
Video is No Longer NY Times' 'Helper Medium'
Sometimes a bigger video player is just a bigger video player. But when the New York Times more than quadrupled the size of its video player on its home page last week, it not only dramatically expanded the stage to display its visual wares, it also revealed a dramatic shift in the way the Gray Lady thinks about the medium ...
Shane Dawson Living Large Off YouTube
Shane Dawson was feeling nervous about his income stream. He’s a YouTube star, after all. Show biz shelf life is short across the board, and there’s no reason to expect longevity on an ever-changing, youth-centric platform that has yet to celebrate its 10th birthday.
Today, he has more than 13.4 million subscribers on his YouTube channels, but they won’t provide him with residuals or catalog sales to keep him in hair product and hoodies as he vlogs into his golden years. So Dawson had a chat with his accountant. “I was like, ‘What if my views go down?'” recalls 26-year-old Dawson. “And he was like, ‘Dude, your money this past year was 25% YouTube, 75% other stuff.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, shit. I guess I am being smart about it and trying to expand my business.'” From the earnest-yet-smarmy tones of host Bill Tundle (Michael Ian Black) and the vapid narcissism of its contestants to its overlit McMansion setting, Yahoo series “Burning Love” looks and sounds like every other reality dating program — only slightly more profane and absurd.
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