Reel Pop

Review: Jonah Ray on SuperDeluxe

A Hawaiian-born fattie turned svelte LAist, Jonah Ray's a young, freakishly tall and professionally peripatetic comedian: erstwhile writer for Showtime's The Offensive Show and MTV's The Andy Milonakis Show, cast member on Adult Swim's Saul of the Mole Men, and, most recently, SuperDeluxe vlogger.

Ray's vids are wide-ranging, including everything from faux celebrity interviews (Tay Zonday, Annie Hardy), to how-tos (Master the Internet, How to Drink for Free), to comic-mawkish rap videos, e.g., Quit Playing Video Games And Get Laid.

Ray's best work on SuperDeluxe is the 6-vid long Freeloader's Guide to Easy Living -- inspired by Ray's own dearth of petty cash --  though some of his more extemporized pieces are hilarious too, e.g., the faux Tay Zonday/Jonah Ray duet of Chocolate Rain, revealed to be a heartbreaking work of scatological genius. Highly recommended.

Jonah Ray on SuperDeluxe | Jonah's bio vids

Review: Beyond the Rave

A twice-weekly vid series from notorious but lately inactive horror production company Hammer, Rave follows a single night in the life of Ed (Jamie Dornan) -- a young, furloughed and pre-Iraq deployment British soldier searching for his girlfriend, who, unbeknownst to him, is enthralled by a troupe of vampire ravers. The searching's done via hearse (owned by Ed's friend Necro, depicted by truly deplorable Seinfeld-era green screen tech). The action is interspersed with vampire carnage, e.g., brawling at a strip club, ambushing a farmer, and eating a coked-up pirate DJ (a demise one can only hope will be included in the unfortunately neglected director's cut DVD of Pump up the Volume). Though not offensively acted, Rave suffers from scene-to-scene disjointedness, an effect not unfamiliar to the horror genre but made worse by the infrequency of new Rave installments. That said, Hammer's probably made an excellent choice in debuting Rave on MySpace, the cultish warrens of which provide sanctuary for the latest generation of both horror and electronica fans.
Beyond the Rave

Full Review: MobLogic

Here's the full review on HollywoodReporter.com, published yesterday, and pasted below:

NEW YORK -- Here's a prediction: After watching a three-minute episode of CBS' new daily online show "MobLogic" -- the curtly bedazzling intro montage, the expertly concise man-on-the-street soundbites, the coquettish deadpan of host Lindsay Campbell -- you'll narrow your eyes, furrow your brow, and think, "Wait a minute: That was by the Tiffany network?"

True. With "MobLogic," the second show from the guys behind the financial-minded video blog "Wallstrip" (acquired last year by CBS for $4 million), CBS Interactive has delivered a visually compelling news and entertainment show with nary a trace of overproduction. Delivered daily via a bounty of Web media (iTunes downloads, YouTube embeds, HD podcasts, etc.), "MobLogic's" m.o. is mostly mob logic, i.e., man-on-the-street interviews. Host Campbell, also nee "Wallstrip," chats up midtown passers-by about a single daily news topic. She invokes, they emote.

Review: 'The All for Nots'

The second offering from Eisner-helmed online media studio Vuguru, and the second series from the guys behind acclaimed vid series "The Burg", "The All for Nots" is the mockumentary-style tale of a Brooklyn band struggling with touring, girlfriends, and groupies.

The first episode (chopped into parts 1a, b, and c) introduces the band members: An oblivious pretty boy frontman, a brooding bassist, a shy female drummer, and a geeked out keyboardist, the latter wearing that familiar anti-MySpace tee "Tom is NOT my friend" (the band members all have profiles on Bebo, a choice that's the ironically rebellious equivalent of not being a joiner). We're also intro'd to a braying blonde groupie and a critical bassist from a band called Sea Monkey Do. Could the self-deprecating humor be. Any. More. Obvious.

Though proffering a derivative brand of "Spinal Tap"-like faux-reality humor -- awkward glances at the camera, hyperbolically flawed characters, pregnant silences -- the just-launched series is commendable for its achingly self-conscious hipster patois, e.g., episode 1C's critic: "They're not punk. They're not even rock. They're just suck. Balls for suck! No, wait, that's not it."

Compared to Vuguru's first series, "Prom Queen," the meta-twee is a little more involved -- the band was "discovered" by a real-world indie rock critic (who also cameo'd in episode 2) and they're a "real" band that's touring the states. It's a good gimmick, an accolade which pretty much sums up the rest of the show, too.
"The All for Nots" | Vuguru

The Digg Reel

How do you aggregate an aggregator? For web sites, it's relatively easy because you're redisplaying the same information: kayak aggs-up airlines prices, techmeme aggs-up blog headlines, diggdot aggs-up Digg and Slashdot items, etc. These are efficient systems that add value through organization or presentation.

Now consider Revision3's latest show, The Digg Reel, a 3-5min show hosted by Jessica Corbin, which aggregates "the best and highest-rated" Digg videos. Like many shows before it -- Entertainment Tonight, Talk Soup, whatever -- Digg Reel uses the infotainment format to repackage news. But in this case we're talking about repacking web video from a specific site. And unfortunately, the show fails to impress.

The idea behind the show is simple enough: Exploit the popularity of Digg and the enthusiasm of its users, plus the popularity of online video and those videos' constituent cheerleaders. On the one hand you act as an entertaining filter, and on the other you attract the notice of the Digg users and video auteurs you cover. They in turn (one hopes) will mention the show favorably -- "look, I'm on The Digg Reel" -- and create a virtuous circle of link love. It worked for the Gotta Digg girl, right?

But it doesn't work for The Digg Reel, and here's why: the show takes Digg's efficient formula and adds editorial, but that means that either the editorial's gotta be better/funnier than the comments you find on Digg (as is the case with Rev3's Diggnation), or the presentation has to be more efficient. Neither is true. Why watch The Digg Reel when you can just watch the videos on Digg and chat with other users in the comments?

You may argue that there are people out there who only want to see what the best videos were, and don't care to participate. Sure. But then, isn't most of Revision3's audience tech savvy in the first place? And wouldn't they find it easier to browse the top Digg videos per day/week/month, rather than watch a less funny version of VH1's Web Junk?

And I guess that's the problem here. It's hard to aggregate Internet memes offline. They lose that participatory power, that feeling of exploration and discovery. All that's left is the presentation you bring to the show. Revision3 plans to add more features and commentary to The Digg Reel, but as of now, the show's very much lacking.

What the Buck

Gay men are the best observers of celebrity culture*, which is why Perez Hilton's an acclaimed personality, and American Idol's hosted by Ryan Seacrest. To see the gay celebrity critic who'll most likely share Perez's post-Internet career arc, check out What The Buck.

One of the most popular entertainment shows on YouTube and hosted by Connecticut  star-boinker Michael Buckley, WTB's a thrice-weekly, 5-minute-ish, infotainment riff covering the vicissitudes of Lindsay's sex life, Brangelina's babies, Britney's Britney, ad infinitum.

Employing a combination of predictable, smarmy gay patter (rapid transitions, appropriation of female speech patterns, heavy use of "love you bitch", etc) almost as hackneyed as my bemused interest-slash-sober condescension, WTB's won YouTube awards for the 12th most subscribed show (all time), and 6th most viewed comedian (all time).

And for good reason: Buckley's facility with words, and deft takedowns of newsmakers, e.g.: "Frickin mama lynn spears. This is how she reacts to crisis. 16 year old daughter gets pregnant, sell the story put her on a magazine cover. Other daughter has mental illness, invite a made-for-tv doctor as cast by Oprah Winfrey to the hospital."

And from WTB's special on Lonelygirl15: "This is the story of an ordinary girl. Her name is Brie. She is cute. She is nerdy. She is a sixteen year old puppet with huge eyebrows and a New Zealand filmmaker's hand up her ass."

See what he's done? He's taken the riotous fabulosity of Perez -- whose critical genius peaked with pink crayon doodles on celebrity photos -- and couched his popspeak in intelligent and often self-deprecating wit, thus appealing to both the celeb fanatics and the black rim-glasses set. He's a super-gay, pop-obsessed, Red Bull-fueled Ira Glass.

Hence the speed. The patter never stops, with the only pauses for breath literally pauses for breath. Buck's the first video personality I've seen who's co-opted the comedic rapidity and snappy editing of Ze Frank -- a quick and breathless pace convenient to short form viewing online -- without copying Ze's signature cadence. Kudos.

Buckley's already appeared on the CW and Fox. Expect him to hit the even bigger time in 2008.

Check out What the Buck on YouTube and at BuckHollywood.com

* IMHO

Review: Jackass 2.5

It's hard to imagine a more merry confluence of audience and medium: devotees of "Jackass," the prank-filled, deleterious TV series-cum-movie franchise-cum-lifestyle brand, and the Internet, home to skateboarding dogs and boys launching bottle rockets betwixt their buttocks. Stupid human tricks, you've come home.

Thus "Jackass 2.5," the 64-minute distraction that began streaming todayfilled with footage that didn't make the cut in "Jackass 2" (plus some between-scenes commentary from the stars). And if the realization that self-flagellation needs a degree of self-editing doesn't boggle the mind (true jackassery, apparently, is a matter of curation), consider you're about to watch stunts deigned so ill-conceived that the Internet was considered the most appropriate venue. What are we, if not men of the people?

Examples of what you get: Fat Preston Lacy dressed up like King Kong and lurching at remote-controlled airplanes atop a Port-O-Potty. Bam Margera flying a kite with his butt. Two fellas trying to box in a conference room after being spun to dizziness in wheeled office chairs. "Straight to the DVD," says an onlooker at one point. "Straight to the DVD."

It's sometimes hilarious stuff, but it does feel like you're watching DVD extras tethered ever-so-loosely into a contiguous whole. Not that "Jackass" stunts need so much context. That's the genius of the series. It's high-margin inanity, nicely done.

But this is hardly worthy of the superlative "first broadband movie ever distributed by a major studio," as described by its co-producers Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment and MTV New Media. What we have here is simply extra footage, along with the star jackasses explaining why the footage didn't make it into a real movie.

The 2 Husbands

The carnival slop genius of reality dating shows is pathos: Pity the botoxed post-rocker on Rock of Love, hate/love/envy the doe-eyed beefcake on The Bachelor. The audience, playing along at home, either feels superior ("I would sooooo be better for Brett Michaels than that back-fatted hussy"), or swoons ("Brad Womack is so sizzly!"). Or whatever. It's as much a competition on the couch as it is on the screen.

And so you'd think that The2Husbands, a new faux-reality comedy show* that pokes fun at contestant culture with a series of scripted submission videos, would hit the funny bone. After all, they're spoofing the conniving women (and men) who consider reality TV to be a shot at easy money. But after watching only a few videos, the single joke -- omg, people are greedy -- runs its course.

Too bad, because the premise is pretty funny. Here's how it works: Two men put themselves up for marriage, agreeing to wed the woman who best makes her case. The women choose one of the bachelors, submit a video about why they'd make the best wife, and vie for votes on the site. The woman with the most votes after November 26th wins and, along with her new husband, gets $50,000.

The men the women are vying for? One's gay: "Ok ladies, what's better, watching him watch baseball, or having someone to go over every page of US Weekly until 3 in the morning?" The other's a habitual Internet contestant who finagled a date with a British rapper after raising $10,000 online. IOW, caricatures of the wouldbe husbands in "real" reality dating shows, where the opportunism is glossed over with a thin patina of beefcakery.

The videos women "submit" to the show poke fun at the dating stereotypes. There's the jappy girl who's only interested in the money. The homely wife who's only interested in the money. The bartender who's...only interested in the money. Get it?

There are a few other stereotypes in play, e.g., the ditzy girl who swears this is all for love. But by and large the show misses the real comedy of dating shows -- the interaction between the contestants as they connive and scheme against one another.

*from The Barbarian Group (makers of ye olde Subservient Chicken)

Quarterlife's Crisis

Quarterlife, the new web series from the creators of "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life" (and possibly being courted by NBC) debuted yesterday.

In my review of the show, I said that Quarterlife was riveting, and I meant that. It's by far the best show I've seen produced for online. But in his Web Scout column for the LA Times, David Sarno makes two good points: One, the series is simply TV production values on the web; two, the series' two-a-week pub schedule may be too infrequent to build momentum with an audience.

Yep, Quarterlife is just like TV, but on the web. That's a good thing. Not every web show has to have a web aesthetic (whatever that is), or a web format, or a web interactive component. I'm not sure who issued the fiat that everything online has to be short and interactive, but it's bunkum. The web allows for those qualities, and employed correctly those qualities can make a web show transcendent. But first and foremost, we all just want quality.

As for the series' publication schedule, Sarno's right to be concerned. Twice a week does not a habitual viewer make. Especially considering the short nature of the program, and the lack of advertisements (unlike network TV) to remind viewers of the pub schedule.

Review: Quarterlife

There is a moment at the beginning of Quarterlife, when a webcam turns on and a girl's face appears, that captures perfectly our capacity for at once loving and loathing ourselves. "My name is Dylan," the girl says. She pauses, quickly adds "Kreiger," and then explains haltingly: "My...my name...Uh..."

Tragedy! Even this simple declarative sentence has gotten away from her. So she gives up and sings: "My naaaame is Dylan Kreee-ger."

Sound familiar? That self-conscious twinge, the hesitant fumblings for a voice. It's footage common to any number of amateur video blogs; in Quarterlife, the new web series about finding one's place in adulthood from Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick ("My So-Called Life", "thirtysomething"), it's aped to excellent effect. Here we have a pretty post-grad girl, trudging through an unfulfilling magazine job ("I'm doomed to be an editorial associate"), envious of her roommates, silently crushing on her neighbor, and suffering through it all on her webcam.

Isn't that dangerous, to build a story around such a personal medium. In lesser hands, there'd be a tendency to over-focus on the webcamming, on the typing of URLs, on buffering icons and comment strings and the gee whiz of it all. Not here. Herskovitz and Zwick simply use the webcam as another camera, interspersing intimate shots with broader action. Like a reality show contestant explaining what just happened, this is Dylan Kreiger's so-called quarter-life.

As she uploads her own insecurities, Dylan outs those of her friends. There's roommate Lisa, the sexy bartender/aspiring actress who sleeps with boys to assuage her self-esteem problems. There's roommate Debra, the dependable one who's moving in with Danny, the lecherous TV adman. Danny's partner and roommate is Jed, who happens to be in love with Debra. They have to resolve that small problem while filming their first ad for a Scion dealership. All the while, Dylan's battling an out-of-touch editor at Women's Attitude who steals her idea for a new section.

And it's riveting. This is probably because Quarterlife doesn't seem to care about you. It doesn't pander to the audience, doesn't entreat you to view the character's profiles on MySpace or comment on their photos or write in to try and change the plot. Quarterlife doesn't need you to interact. As a series, it stands on its own. It seems not to care about what everyone is saying right now (this very second!) in the comments field under every video.

And that's odd, considering Quarterlife isn't just a series. It's a media platform, complete with a vlog-based social network (quarterlife.com) designed to be a support network for "creatives" fumbling through post-collegiate life. You couldn't create a more self-conscious show unless you spent 30 minutes pointing a webcam at your pierced navel.

But Herskovitz and Zwick have managed to suss the tension that exists online between presentation and interaction. They've created a show that's compelling as a standalone drama, but which offers further interactive rewards for those interested enough to pursue them.

Quarterlife premieres November 12 on MySpace. The social network is accepting members now.

Review: MySpace's Roommates

MySpace's Roommates rips off The Hills. That's ok. It doesn't take a wonder of production profundity -- or some special insight into the mammalian psyche-slash-boxer shorts -- to make apple-cheeked, pearl-teethed, nubile girls in bikinis alluring, bankable fare. It's simple T&A. No, no, wait. It's T&A and -- this being MySpace -- it's also interactive.

Let's start there. Roommates is a scripted faux reality show about eight post-college girls (four in an LA house, four mysteriously cavorting elsewhere) that promises character profiles, vlogs, and the opportunity for the audience to affect the storyline. IOW: You get to tell hot girls on camera what to do. Sort of like webcam stripping, but with a thin patina of MySpace respectability and a major advertiser (Ford).

There isn't much of a story so far to interact with. The season opens with a short introduction to the girls, who prance around their house in booty shorts and lingerie. There's a tiny dog. The girls fart on each other. That's episode one. Episode two's a girl's-night-in party which ends, apparently, with one of the girls (Heather) going out afterwards and hooking up. We find that out in episode three, in which the girls talk in the kitchen. Episode four: The girls watch TV. Episode five: The girls play in the hot tub. If you suspect I'm not doing the story justice, simple say "peace out, bitches" five times and you've reiterated the entirety of the dialogue.

There is one other component to the story. According to the storyline, the person filming Roommates is a pleasant looking fella named Justin, the girls' best male friend from college. Justin doesn't appear on camera. He doesn't talk. He's just always there. Kinda like Tom on MySpace.

If there's one thing that will save Roommates from complete mediocrity, it will be the interactive component. One worries, though, that this time MySpace is relying too much on that, to the detriment of creating something an audience would want to interact with in the first place.

[view the site | read about Roommates at hollywoodreporter.com]

Six online video shows you should have watched (and still can)

Thought it might be worthwhile to pull together links to some of my reviews of web-only shows. There's some amazing stuff out there:

Review: Getting Away with Murder | IFC.com
Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be hitmen. Especially nebbish hitmen like Seth Silver, who at 25 still lives at home, takes his mom contra dancing once a week, and always answers her calls, even if he's in the middle of a quadruple homicide. Mom, in this case, is Rhonda "Ronnie" Silver, a Jewish television chef who thinks Seth is a veterinarian. The only person who knows the truth about Seth's true vocation: His womanizing friend with a shoe fetish, Rex.

Review: Prom Queen | promqueen.tv
Teens, you may have heard, speak the ling. That's ling as in lingo and lingo as in abbreviations: Whatev for whatever, ridic for ridiculous, obv for obvious (duh). The words are glib but the shorthand, meant to convey maximum meaning in minimal time, is useful. Teens are efficient that way. They come pre-edited for time, if not for content.The same goes for Prom Queen...

Review: Wallstrip | wallstrip.com
A cheap and easy critical approach to Wallstrip, the "stock culture meets pop culture" videoblog that CBS just bought for undisclosed single-digit millions, goes something like this: Coquettish brunette in a baby tee talks finance, flirts. Must be Amanda Congdon 2.0.

Review: Clark and Michael | clarkandmichael.com
This is the age of inside baseball. The voyeurism of lonelygirl15 (inside teens), the unfettered insight through SNL Backstage (inside television), the metacognitive conceit of Nobody's Watching and Goodnight, Burbank (inside the making of television), the deconstructionism of SNLOCmeme (inside television drama). We've become so accustomed to the stories we tell ourselves that we tell ourselves stories about those stories. Old hat? Feels new. Especially now that the Hollywood creation myth has been metastasized into YouTube.

Review: Cafe Confidential | metacafe.com/cc
My first time was awkward. I was 18, she was drunk on Boone's Farm wine, and the event was interrupted by a tall friend with dreadlocks who opened the door -- later, he would swear he was looking for the bathroom -- and tripped over our discarded clothes, fell, and landed squarely on my butt. True story. Not something you'd tell your folks. But, ironically enough in our modesty-free Web culture, a confession you might have no problem sharing with, oh, the entire Internet. (Hi mom.)

Review: Starring Amanda Congdon | abcnews.com
You can learn a lot about a woman by the t-shirt she wears. On her first day as an ABC news correspondent, Amanda Congdon, former hostess of popular videoblog Rocketboom, wore a t-shirt that read Steely Dan.

Devil's Trade

The best performance in Devil's Trade comes from a piece of bark. The bark belongs to a cursed tree in New Jersey (played quite capably by a normal tree outside Los Angeles) which, in the course of this web-only horror series, lures one teenager into jumping from a speeding car, gets another run over by a truck, and mimics briefly the burning bush from Exodus. You'd be pissed, too, if you were planted by the turnpike. 

The FEARnet series wouldn't be of much note, except for two details: It's in line with a series of horror shorts that are finding their way to the Web, and it's executive produced by Sam Raimi, director of the brilliant Evil Dead trilogy and writer/director of the plodding interminable just damn bad recent Spider-Man 3. This is his first credited project post-webhead.

Devil's Trade is directed by FX journeyman Toby Wilkins (inferno artist on Scooby-Doo 2, Not Another Teen Movie), and it's pretty and well-produced. But it also consistently fails to frighten and ends with a surprise twist that’s less dramatic than desultory. 

The series follows the misadventure of a goth-obsessed student named Darren who, on a lark, buys a "cursed" piece of bark from devilstrade.com. The bark, bent into the shape of a cross and taken from the cursed Jersey tree – as if there's only one cursed piece of flora in the garden state – arrives in the mail and immediately curses Darren, who begins coughing blood. Busty sister Anna then starts to see visions of herself coughing blood. Boyfriend Jim, after trying to burn the bark on a Weber grill, levitates and nearly chokes to death. Then it’s off on a roadtrip to find the previous owner.

There are a few tense moments -- the bloody shower scene ain't bad -- but the writing is atrocious. If you're not a die hard horror fan, give this one a pass.

Wallstrip

A cheap and easy critical approach to Wallstrip, the "stock culture meets pop culture" videoblog that CBS just bought for undisclosed single-digit millions, goes something like this: Coquettish brunette in a baby tee talks finance, flirts. Must be Amanda Congdon 2.0.

That's Amanda Congdon, the blonde bombshell born of videoblog Rocketboom, who graduated to fame (although some would say to obscurity) as an anchor for her own show on ABCNews.com. Now there's another pretty "it" girl, another snarky "it" show, and another cumbersome network lumbering through the web, King Kong-like, a doe-eyed starlet in its hairy fist.

But the easy analysis is misleading. Where other vlogs snark far and wide, Wallstrip adopts a popular meta-conscious patois -- the self-flagellating wit you hear on, say, The Daily Show -- and applies it to a single subject: Investing. The effect is consistently enjoyable news and entertainment for a well-defined demographic. Call it the rich niche.

A typical show goes like this: The aforementioned coquettish brunette, Lindsay Campbell, introduces a stock or investment trend -- Apple, Google, strip clubs, y'know -- and then in three to five minutes tells you why it's hot. FedEx: Hot logistics software. Chipotle: Hot customer service. Sounds dull, but then there's Campbell's gently mocking voice: "I do watch Suze Orman," said an interviewee. "A self-made millionaire. You know that." Campbell: "And a lesbian."

Oftentimes the show's creator, Howard Lindzon, will make a guest appearance. In the first episode, he made a pilgrimage to Apple's flagship store on 5th Avenue ("the Mecca, the wailing wall") to illustrate why Apple's stock has been rising ever since the company began opening retail outlets. In the episode about Nintendo, Lindzon's son demonstrated the Wii's appeal by beating Campbell in two games of Wii Tennis.

See the trick? A narrowly-defined target audience, a pretty girl, and lots of color around a dull subject. After an episode you feel smarter. And that's the operative word, "feel," a verb usually relegated in financial circles to describing bouts of agida.

In buying Wallstrip, CBS committed to a multi-year contract. They hired not only Campbell but also the show's producers. Lindzon will stay on as as a consultant, the show will continue to be distributed through outlets like iTunes, and CBS pledged to develop more web-only series. You could say the Tiffany Network is diversifying its content portfolio.

Review: Getting Away with Murder

Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be hitmen. Especially nebbish hitmen like Seth Silver, who at 25 still lives at home, takes his mom contra dancing once a week, and always answers her calls, even if he's in the middle of a quadruple homicide. Mom, in this case, is Rhonda "Ronnie" Silver, a Jewish television chef who thinks Seth is a veterinarian. The only person who knows the truth about Seth's true vocation: His womanizing friend with a shoe fetish, Rex.

Such are the Oedipal underpinnings of "Getting Away with Murder," IFC's new web comedy series which debuted on Sunday. The series is at once hilarious, depraved and gory. Happy Mother's Day!

And hello Peter Pan. "Getting Away with Murder" marks yet another take, albeit a brilliantly funny one, on the man-child character with a Peter Pan complex (thank you Wes Anderson). Once a charming expression of boyhood imagination, Peter Pan has become shorthand for social retardation and sexual dysfunction (thank you Michael Jackson). Thus Seth, no good with the ladies -- "I hate girls," reads his latest blog entry -- becomes disturbingly good with guns. And garrotes. And C4. He's found the fountain of eternal youth, but the spigot's spurting blood.

Speaking of: We meet Seth for the first time at the Ponce de Leon Hotel and Spa. Disguised as Randy the bellhop, Seth sneaks into his victim's suite and uses a silencer to dispatch two burly guards, who writhe comically as blood spatters the camera lens. Next up is a half-naked girl in the bedroom, whom Seth drugs with a syringe. Then he pokes at her boob like it's a science experiment. The coup de grace: Drowning an old man in the bathtub. And then his cell phone rings.

"Ma, I told you never to call me at work!" But Ronnie hasn't found him out. She only wants him to pick up some asparagus on his way home.

And so it goes throughout the 13-episode season, with Seth casually greasing old men and avoiding his mom's preening while trying to set a date with a bookstore clerk. On his trail: An FBI investigator and another emotionally vestigial hitman named Pinkie, a sadistic torturer who plays "Hostel" to Seth's "Grosse Pointe Blank." Playing sidekick to the anti-hero is the boy wonder Rex, a foul-mouthed cad who works at a mall store called Pretty in Pumps. Beside this lech, Seth comes across as the good guy.

And isn't that a neat trick. In a hyperviolent world beset by real-life school shootings and daily reports of international violence, a cold-blooded hitman becomes a sympathetic character. Strangely endearing, this killer who loves his mamma.

"Getting Away with Murder" is IFC's first web-only series, with new shows debuting every Monday through August 6. The show is written by Andrew Schwartz and written/directed by Bennett Barbakow. ifc.com/static/sections/gettingawaywithmurder/

***

p.s. The actor who plays Seth, Gilbert John Echternkamp, has also filmed a documentary about his parents called "Frank and Cindy." That doc was featured in episode four of "This American Life" on Showtime.

SNL Backstage

Once again (but this time on purpose) Saturday Night Live is putting the Web to good use. SNL Backstage, a recent addition to NBC.com, gives viewers a glimpse behind the scenes, through video tours and interviews with producers and hosts, of television's longest running sketch comedy program. It's humorous. It's entertaining. It's the inside baseball of professional funny.

How appropriate. Audiences can't get enough behind-the-comedy-scenes these days. There's "30 Rock," of course, a television show about a television show that's chock full of that television show's alums. And there's the ill-fated "Studio 60" which, despite its failings, did a great job of showing how mediocre some of SNL's sketches are. If you've watched those shows, watching Backstage can be unnerving. Almost as if you've seen this reality show before, but with better lighting and more punchlines.

And isn't that surreal. SNL Backstage, a reality show mini-doc, has to nestle itself between fictional portrayals. Which makes some of the stranger shots -- at one point Chris Kattan walks by in a dominatrix costume -- seem less powerful.

The most entertaining clip (there are 13 so far, plus a trailer) is the one that feels the most surreptitious. We're privileged to see Andy Samberg meet Lili Allen with a handshake, then Drew Barrymore arrives to shoot a promo teaser for that week's show. The camera dwells on each actor, and on some of the supporting crew, but pans away each time the subject notices. Reality TV, without the aping for the TV. How uncommon when the event, not the fact that the camera is filming the event, is more important.

And then there's the moments when Barrymore and Allen break to giggle at Samberg's jokes. Those breaks are so much more intimate than a laugh track. So much more "real" (with air quotes).

When the actors are done filming they walk past the camera, which catches Lili Allen saying Samberg, as if she just realized, "You're funny."

This dud's for you

I've written several times about Bud.tv and why it's failing. A new article from AdAge shows that their traffic continues to trend downward.

The reason -- unsexy as it may be to writers and producers -- is that the site is simply not accessible. Pop-up windows, content wrapped completely in Flash, and poor use of screen real estate are not good things to throw at viewers. Plus you can’t embed videos and, if you send your friends to the site, they have to register.

Think of it like this, A-B: If you had two televisions in your room -- a TV that worked normally and offered premium channels and another TV that was small, didn't offer premium channels, and took five minutes to turn on -- which TV do you think you'd use more often?

Review: Prom Queen

My review of Prom Queen is live at the Hollywood Reporter. I've reproduced it below:

Teens, you may have heard, speak the ling. That's ling as in lingo and lingo as in abbreviations: Whatev for whatever, ridic for ridiculous, obv for obvious (duh). The words are glib but the shorthand, meant to convey maximum meaning in minimal time, is useful. Teens are efficient that way. They come pre-edited for time, if not for content.

The same goes for Prom Queen, the new teen murder mystery serialized on MySpace, financed by Michael Eisner's Tornante Co, and produced by Big Fantastic. Made for generation ADD, the show unfolds in 90-second segments. That's 90 seconds, as in half the time of a typical commercial break on television. Doled out over eighty days -- "OMG, prom is sooo close! Getting closer! LOL!" -- the segments combine to form two hours of teenage scheming, dreaming, and hooking up. Light fare, lightly sprinkled. The phrase "death by croutons" comes to mind.

So here's the set-up: Danica, a British exchange student, is filming a video yearbook. The series opens when she wakes up, Donnie Darko style, in her host's backyard -- scantily clad and with perfect hair, natch -- stumbles into her room, and finds her minicam is still filming. "Oh no," she says. Cut. That's episode one. Episode two: We're introduced to the dramatis personae as Danica uses that minicam to interview her schoolmates about "this American obsession called Prom."

The characters are caricatures: There's blonde-haired Nikki, who hearts Chad; blue-eyed Chad, who hearts Nikki; and mousy Sadie, who hearts Morissey (but makes eyes at Chad). Then: Slutty Lauren (who has daddy issues), surly Curtis (who has anger issues), and rich boy Nolan (who's just an ass). Sophisticated Courtney is a brunette foil to Nikki, and the enigmatic Josh is the requisite troubled teen. Rounding out the cast is Ben who plays sports, excels in school, and receives an anonymous text message at the end of episode two that says "U R going 2 kill the prom queen." Bum bum bum!

Given all these characters (there's actually about 15 in all) and so little contiguous time to develop them, Prom Queen relies on visual shorthand. Instead of dialogue, monologue. Instead of scenes, scene changes. It's almost as if the show is a trailer for itself. This isn't entirely a bad thing. For one, you literally have no time to get bored. And the only challenge is remembering the names of so many good-looking white people. Help comes in the form of the characters' MySpace profiles, which are constantly updated with new friends, new comments and even personal videos.

And then there's the sex. Prom Queen, like the real-life MySpace, is honeycombed with sexual subplots. In the first few episodes Curtis talks about getting laid, Lauren tries to jump Josh in her car, Lauren's mom comes on to Ben, and Chad gets an off-camera blowjob in the boy's locker room. Typical Degrassi-style titillation, but somehow the MySpace tie-in makes it feel more transgressive.

That's why the show compels: This could be your high school (if you were only so lucky). Or your kid's high school (if you were only so cursed). Each segment feels like a synopsis of daily drama, a Max Headroom blipvert for an oversexed cohort. It is the first mainstream online video drama, and it demands your attention. On that very important level, Prom Queen succeeds.

Battlestar Potemkin

The Battlestar Gallactica videomaker toolkit has received a few vids since launching earlier this month. My review appeared in the Hollywood Reporter yesterday:

But viewers: Don't expect the uploaded vids to be "Battlestar Potemkin." Instead, think "Periscope Down." And so: An uploaded short called "Meet the Fleet Episode 26: Ben Sumar," a profile of the space fleet's toilet paper manager, in which we learn the truth behind the fleet's strategic movements. Or "Starbuck's Demise," a re-enactment of a recent episode that substitutes children in parked cars for pilots in spaceships. And "The Other Cylons," which imagines a conversation among three robots about dating their humanoid confederates. ("What's he got that I don't have? A pulse. Besides that? Uh, human genitalia.")

That's the comedy. But the earnest reimaginings? Barely watchable. It's amateur content like this -- "I can't get the image of that dead girl's eyes out of my head!" -- that makes one appreciate the character development, scripting, pacing and editing that goes into the actual show. The exception might be "Viper Pilot's Log," an upload from Melody Mooney, the author of an existing and popular vlog (at least by "Galactica" fanboy standards). Mooney has an eerie ability to mimic the dramatic script, shaky camera work and character development of the TV series. Give that woman a part in the real show.

YouTube's Award No Show

The YouTube polity has spoken: Brits on treadmills, teens and ninjas. Moderate rock and hugs. A cartoon. A half-naked Asian. These are pretty choices.

The problem, of course, is YouTube's press image. Can't very well make tough editorial choices or promote controversial fare. What about best hoax? Best police brutality? Wittiest international racism? Most artful use of a stun gun? YouTube is the world's town hall. This is Chuck E. Cheese fare.

And the awards feel superfluous. The votes were cast in views a long time ago. Nothing to see here. Move along. Or stay and watch this little fella. Rascally.

Review: Acceptable TV

Television was once for the lazy, the slouchers and the ploppers, the exhausted folk who found catharsis in a change of channels. Then American Idol, then YouTube, and suddenly TV is all about participating, about voting has-beens off dance floors and wouldbe's onward to pop stardom. The trope: America has fallen in love with democracy. The truth: To the boob tube polity, democracy is just a fancy way of saying "you suck."

Thus: Acceptable TV, the new VH1 series that brings suffrage to sketch comedy, letting you decide what skits are good and which deserve to be canned.

The show debuted Friday at 10pm. Each 30-minute broadcast contains five three-minute skits, each a proposed TV series, and you, the viewer, are asked to vote for your favorite on Acceptable.tv. The three skits with the fewest votes are canceled and replaced with new skits the following week. Jack Black, stentorian goofball, is the executive producer. Producers Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab, creators of the short film competition Channel 101 and original producers for the Sarah Silverman program, are comedians pro tempore of the 10-person cast.

My full review will appear on the Hollywood Reporter's web site later this week. What I don't talk about in the review, however, is the show's approach to the Web audience, which absolutely rocks. Take a look at the site: You can vote on the show, upload your own skits for consideration (the producers show one user upload per show), and embed the show's skits.  Very cool. Looks like the site has drawn around 40 comments per skit already. Except for Mr. Sprinkles, which has 102, and looks destined to return next week.

Below, one of the premier skits, Homeless James Bond:

Full Review: Steven Bochco's Cafe Confidential

My review of Bochco's Cafe Confidential is up on the Hollywood Reporter site now:

The Metacafe channel debuted March 19 with more than 40 pretaped confessions, and it's Bochco's first foray into Web-only territory. The videos have no script, no stars, no names. Just young faces, talking animatedly to a camera that holds steady for two minutes on their eye rolls, "ohmigods" and other storytelling standbys as they talk about their first times, their weird families, their most embarrassing moments. Jerry Springer, you've been disintermediated.

There's the preppy Asian girl talking about her first time ("My mom was like, 'It hurt, didn't it?' "); the black college student who hooked up while his grandmother slept in the same room ("Why you up so late, son?"); and the white kid with a mohawk who recounts his date with an overweight black girl ("easily, easily 250 pounds."). If the Web is amenable to short-form cinema, then this, apparently, is verite as one-night stand.

The comments I've seen over on Metacafe so far haven't been encouraging. And Jackson West at NewTeeVee is none too impressed.

Final Four of Online Video

Click the image above for a full screen view.

In celebration of the 2007 NCAA tournament, and with a hat tip to "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything" (which we haven’t read but hear is super good), Reel Pop presents the Final Four of Online Video. Collected here, part one in the four-part series, which we're calling "Pain and Simple": Among the various ways to amuse yourself online, watching people maim themselves (and others) ranks well for lowest effort and highest reward. From nut shots to happy slaps, errant trampoline bounces to face plants on concrete, the Internet, it seems, was made for schadenfreude.

We'll be pubbing three more of these brackets before March 16th, when the NCAA Final Four starts. Whereas this bracket concentrates on stupid and painful videos, the next brackets will feature famous folks' faux pas, rapping/karaoke/cover bands, and insane stunts involving expensive machinery.

Top Ten Problems with Bud.tv

I'm working on a review of Bud.tv for the dead tree version of the Hollywood Reporter. Below are some of my notes.

Overall: Bud.tv fails because it inserts too much friction into the online viewing process which, due to the accessibility of video-sharing sites, has become a frictionless experience for the end user. Although Anhesuer-Busch's intent is not to compete directly with sites like YouTube, Bud.tv nevertheless competes indirectly for users' time and attention. If I have five minutes to waste, I'm not going to Bud.tv. I'd rather check my Tailrank or Digg RSS feeds for funny videos, or surf easily (easily!) through one of any hundreds of video-sharing (sharing!) sites.

Here are my top ten gripes:

1. The design of the site is incompatible with accessible viewing.
   Screen space is valuable real estate. Who made the decision to a) put the content in a pop-up window, and b) only show five clickable videos per page? Plus, what's up with the Flash wrapper? Even though Flash accessibility has come a long way since I programmed it (Flash 5), it's still easier for everyone if you build your site with HTML.
2. The actual content is too many clicks away.
   First I have to login. Then I have to scroll through the videos to find a video I want to watch. There's no list of all available videos, and there's little additional info to tell me if I want to actually click a video. For example: When I see the little rectangle for "Afterworld," I hover over it with my mouse. But what does the pop-up box say? Nothing. It just repeats the title (that I already knew) and gives me the length of the clip. Ugh.
3. The login screen is both useless and annoying.
   This problem has been covered ad nauseum. I understand A-B didn't want to do this. But they better find a way around it, and fast.
4. You can't embed videos elsewhere.
   Like listing a house for sale in the newspaper but not providing a photo.
5. Even when you send a direct link to a friend, your friend has to login to view the content.
   If I have five minutes to waste, I'm not going to waste it filling out a form.
6. The content is mostly advertisements for other content.
   I understand and enjoy the rapidly diminishing distinction between content and advertising. However. I do not enjoy logging in with the expectation of watching original programming and finding only commercials. This feels like playing Super Mario Bros. and finding out the princess is in another castle.
7. A-B undermined the initial traffic bump by not having the most accessible parts of the site -- i.e. the desktop client -- ready for use.
   Maybe I should just subscribe to the site's RSS feed so I'll know when the desktop client is ready. Oh wait, there is no RSS feed. Good thing I enjoy logging into useless sites to keep tabs on them.
8. The content is funny, but not funnier than what you can see on more accessible video-sharing sites.
   I like Tim Meadows. I like him more here, here and here. It's easier to get to, see.
9. There are not enough hot girls.
   WTF?
10. Anheuser-Busch did not set correct expectations.
    I understand that Bud.tv represents the return of corporate content, a la early television programming. But when you announce to the world via the New York Times magazine that you've hired the best writers and spent $30 million dollars creating content, I better break my diaphragm with elephant-sized guffaws. Or, failing that, at least logon to the thing without having to use my dad's ID.

I trust Bud.tv will get better, and I'm looking forward to seeing the new series that they will show on the site -- that will certainly be content with big name actors and writers that you can't find elsewhere. But boy howdy, for now, they flubbed their debut.

Motionbox: Saving the Web, One Boring Vacation Video at a Time

Of the three plus hours of video I shot during my last beach vacation, there was exactly one moment -- hidden somewhere between the requisite shots of an early morning shoreline and a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit -- that I want to watch again: My friend Reid McDaniel, John Deere cap turned backwards, screaming the lyrics to "Sweet Child of Mine" into a conch shell. Truly, a thing to be amazed by.

Unfortunately, I've long since consigned the disk that holds that performance to a shoebox. Because no matter how much I want to share it, Reid's Axl-worthy opus is surrounded, literally, by hours of superfluous footage. His three minute karaoke bit would be an instant YouTube classic. But the ten minutes of sand and wind preceding it? Not so much.

This is precisely the problem that a small, 25-person video-sharing company called Motionbox wants to help you solve.

"The video sites are filled with very long, very boring clips that might only have one interesting part in them," said Motionbox co-founder CEO Chris O'Brien from his 10th floor office in Manhattan's financial district. "You're not going to watch it all, and neither is anybody else."

Since the company's public launch last July, Motionbox has been helping users not only upload their videos, but also trim them and share the relevant segments with friends, family and the Web.

Part of this technology is "deep tagging," or applying labels to specific segments or chapters of a video. Once a video has been deep tagged, any user can navigate directly to those segments of the video^[1], skipping the chaff to get to the wheat as it were.

Or, if a user prefers, they can simply drag a selection box across a video's segments (see picture, left) and crop the video down. Either way, the user can then share or embed the full clip, or just share and embed the segment they like.

As Motionbox co-founder and CMO Douglas Warshaw^[2] tells it, "the container is absolutely irrelevant to you. You want to get to the good stuff, and the good stuff is defined by what you want to watch, it's not an aesthetic or normative value."

This approach to online video solves a problem that's familiar to anyone who's ventured into the dark continent beyond YouTube's "most viewed" category. The videos populating that "long tail" of content tend to depart from the edited, narrative style that makes longer professional videos (Daily Show clips, news reports) and snack-sized amateur videos (crazy dogs, morons) successful. Most of the time, unedited videos are just plain boring.

Beyond deep tagging and cropping, Motionbox's video player can also help users make better decisions about what to watch.

The thumbnail version of the player (see photo, right) lets you preview a clip by "scrubbing" its timeline, potentially saving you the effort of actually watching the video to see if it's good.

These features apply the principles of the attention economy, in which Web users parcel out their precious time in the form of clicks, page views and time spent.^[3]

(In the attention economy, the quality of your video watching experience is indirectly proportional to how difficult it is to watch the clip. This is one reason YouTube has been so successful -- videos are quick to load and there are no advertisements -- and also why pre-roll advertising tends to alienate users.)

On the surface, Motionbox's approach to video seems similar to the approach taken by editing site Jumpcut or Eyespot. All three sites are betting that, as consumers become savvy with online video tools, they'll move from sharing and commenting to splicing and dicing.

"But people who are trying to recreate the iMovie experience online are completely going down a rabbit hole," said Warshaw. According to him, Motionbox is aiming at a much broader audience that simply wants to see and share what's relevant to them.

Warshaw is hoping that Motionbox's simple tools will appeal to lay users who don't want power-editing features. "Some of these things, you have to take a class to figure out. I don't want to take that class," he said.

As Motionbox's traffic stats suggest, the site is still well below the average user's radar. But the company isn't relying on user-edited video alone. Currently Motionbox supports video-sharing for NBC's affiliate stations. Users can upload video through, say, NBC Channel 5 in Chicago and can tag and view that video once it's approved by the station's staff. The video is also automatically added to Motionbox's servers, so the user gets the immediate benefit of interacting with the video at motionbox.com as well.

Motionbox execs are mum about future partnership specifics, but hint that they'll have something to announce in the next 60 to 90 days.

Among the types of partners they're looking at: Media companies and music labels, businesses that need to provide a place for fans to legally -- and easily -- upload videos of concerts and other public appearances. The label would provide the content, while Motionbox provides the video-sharing and editing technology, plus an online community.

"You're a media company," Warshaw said. "But I'm a mosh pit."

[1] Google Video also offers the ability to jump to a precise moment in a video. But Google's solution requires the user to type a timestamp into the video's URL. An engineer's solution to a lay user's problem.

[2] Warshaw looks like a more handsome John Turturro.

[3] Motionbox's technology potentially also addresses the problem of video findability. Whereas searching for text on the Web is relatively easy, a successful search for video requires that the video be tagged and described appropriately. I discussed findability briefly in this post.
 

Blip.tv: Farm Team for the New, New Hollywood

Anyone who followed YouTube phenom lonelygirl15 as she skyrocketed to fame, or watched as self-made stars like Brookers or the Lonely Island trio found mainstream outlets for their work, understands that Hollywood has begun to use online video sites as a new kind of talent pool. These days, talent is less likely to be found at an open audition in Los Angeles than, say, performing karaoke in their bedroom in Worcester, MA.

It's a phenomenon that New York startup blip.tv is hoping to take advantage of.

"It's definitely clear to me that the Hollywood world is beginning to see sites like blip.tv as the farm teams of talent," said blip.tv COO Dina Kaplan from her 3rd-floor loft office in Manhattan's Chinatown.

While some sites try to capitalize on the online video boom by aggregating as much content as possible -- copyrighted or otherwise -- blip.tv is taking a more personal approach. The real value, according to Kaplan, is in the videobloggers themselves.

Like YouTube, Blip.tv is a combination destination and syndication portal that helps videobloggers publish their work both on blip.tv and on other sites. Unlike YouTube though, blip.tv isn't interested in promoting music videos, network television shows, or other previously published and copyrighted work.

"We try very hard to promote a culture of sharing original content," said CEO Mike Hudack. "Don't get me wrong, there's a market for piracy, but we're very careful to steer our users away from that. We just don't need it...In some ways it does put you at a disadvantage, but there's also something very attractive about the higher quality you'll find."

Blip.tv isn't hurting for quality shows. Perhaps the most famous videoblogger using the site is Amanda Congdon, who approached Blip.tv before her Amanda Across America tour.
Blip.tv is also a second home to shows like Goodnight Burbank, Something to be Desired, and the war videoblog Alive in Baghdad.

Blip.tv works like you'd expect it would, with some additional features. Videobloggers upload their work to the site and create a subdomain. The blogger can then choose to syndicate his or her videos to blogs or other sites. Starting tomorrow, users will be able to cross-post their work directly to MySpace. The new video will then be automatically announced in the bloggers' friends' MySpace bulletin space.

The MySpace feature is just one of several new features that Blip.tv will be rolling out on Saturday. Perhaps the biggest change will be the site's new homepage, which will attempt to provide an experience more akin to a television network's site.

Hudack said they're making the homepage change out of consideration for their role as editorial gatekeepers, while trying to retain the site community's independent attitude. "We're sort of removing the heavy hand of the studios," he said.

Saturday will also mark the introduction of several new advertising models on the site.  Hudack and Kaplan said that new advertising deals will allow bloggers to choose between different types of advertising, from pre-roll to post-roll to contextual banner ads that appear alongside the videos.

They noted that on blip.tv, whether to apply advertising to a video is at the blogger's discretion.

So far, Blip.tv's traffic stats -- about 1 million page views per month according to comScore -- seem to indicate the site is still struggling to attract users. Hudack and Kaplan say, however, it's not their intent to be a destination site.

Blip.tv has also recently partnered with video mashup site Eyespot (which also recently added new features), and the company provides the underlying technology for CNN's user-generated video site, CNN Exchange.

By positioning themselves as a conduit for new voices, Blip.tv hopes to become something of a talent powerbroker in the online video age.

"The talent, they're not just going to jump at the opportunity to be on TV anymore," said Kaplan.

"I mean, I'm not saying they're going to turn down millions of dollars, but it'll take a lot more to make them jump from a medium that lets them play by their own rules."

Post YouTube, is Metacafe the Next Big Thing?

Now that Google has puchased YouTube, what's an online video pundit to do? Talk to the next most popular site on the Web, I guess. Have you heard of Metacafe?

Metacafe the Web site was launched in May 2005 in Tel Aviv, seven months before Chad Hurley and Steve Chen flipped the switch in California on YouTube.com. The company has 85 employees and recently began moving its offices to the Bay Area. Metacafe also has $23 million in venture capital.

The site's traffic stats, while nowhere near YouTube's, are impressive, and Metacafe leads the pack of video-sharing sites vying for attention. According to comScore, Metacafe received about 525M page views in August, about 350M more than its closest contender, Dailymotion. (See traffic chart, left)

To borrow a Web 1.0 phrase, Metacafe is also very sticky. The site ranks third (see chart, right) in average minutes per visitor (64.3), right behind YouTube (66.7). Both trail long-form TV destination Veoh (247.1). Metacafe is also third in average pages per visitor, with 41. YouTube has 65 and Veoh 68 according to comScore.

The amount of time spent on Metacafe is interesting. Readers who follow social networks may recall that Facebook was famously touted as the only social network where 93% of users returned every month, with most staying online all day long. Those usage stats were used, albeit briefly, to justify Facebook's rumored asking price of $2 billion.

Metacafe CEO Arik Czerniak doesn't shy away from the comparison. "Metacafe is to YouTube like what Facebook is to MySpace," he says.

But purists beware: Metacafe isn't a pure video-sharing play. Rather, it's something Czerniak dubs "a top entertainment destination," a one-stop shop for sharing videos, games and ringtones.

Metacafe isn't a purely Web-based creation either. The site has its genesis in a desktop application that was originally launched in 2003.

For a video to make it onto the site, it first goes through a quick but extensive filtering process, courtesy of volunteer editors using the desktop app. The editors' ranking is then combined with what Czerniak calls a "behavioral ranking" -- data culled from monitoring how users interact with clips on the desktop app.

According to Czerniak, the application is the key to Metacafe's success.

"Metacafe was originally conceived as a desktop app," says CEO Arik Czerniak, who says the app is for video-sharing power users who are addicted to video. "We have about 2 million dedicated users of the client [compared to 20M users of the site], and they consume about five to ten times as much video. The client generates a massive amount of usage data that you can't get from just the Web...for instance, if someone replays a video ten times or deletes it without finishing the first view. So we use the client as a control group for video-ranking and grading."

According to Czerniak, that filtering process ensures only high-quality videos make it to the site.

"How users vote [on other sites] is not a good proxy for quality," he says, "because only two to three percent of people bother to vote."

Metacafe's behavioral ranking and filtering technology may also make the company attractive to content owners. Czerniak says Metacafe's filters can determine when duplicate content is uploaded, even if the bit rate or length of the videos are different. Now that Google and YouTube are setting the bar by adding fingerprinting filters to their sites, Metacafe may be in a position to woo partners.

Czerniak says his site has some partnerships in the works, but of course he can't reveal anything yet.

Summary
Personally, I'm not sold on the desktop application. I understand its value to Metacafe, but I can't see a generation trained on Web apps adopting a thin client. I'm also enamored of the idea that quality emerges through attention data, not explicit rankings, so I think Metacafe's filtering process is an unnecessary impediment to rapid user adoption.

But the traffic stats say I'm wrong. Both Metacafe and Veoh (which has a different business model, but that's another story) use desktop clients, and both sites are trouncing their closest competitors, which are mostly purely web-based. The exception is Dailymotion, a French site with a very broad reach outside the United States.

At any rate, keep an eye on Metacafe. They're in the valley now. They're coming for your eyeballs.

p.s. They're coming for your eyeballs? Worst. Kicker. Ever.

p.p.s. As Nalts explains in the comments below, Metacafe is also experimenting with revenue sharing via a "Producer Rewards" program. That program, currently in beta, will be opening up later this month. I'll be talking with Czerniak again when it does.

Reel Pop Review: Veoh.com

Today we present another installment in our ongoing series of video site reviews. Up today: Veoh.com.

Veoh is one of the most promising video-sharing sites, but also one of the most troubled. In its brief history, Veoh has angered videobloggers and been sued by an adult media company, in both instances for copying and distributing their work without permission.

Despite these issues, Veoh seems to be popular among media companies, perhaps because the site is based on P2P technology and promises to deliver "tv-quality" video. Both Time Warner and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner invested in the company last spring (in what happened to be Eisner's first business deal post-Mouse House). Veoh has also purportedly been speaking to TV networks about distributing shows. So far the only network signed on is TNT.

Veoh is just as easy to use as YouTube, but it doesn't have that same "community" feel. The adult-oriented content is also more prevalent, whereas on YouTube you have to search to find anything racy. (Veoh does offer a content filter option.) On the other hand, Veoh doesn't limit files sizes, so users can upload long form content. Want to screen your latest project? Put it up on Veoh.

Like Metacafe, profiled last week, Veoh offers a desktop application that manages your videos. Unlike Metacafe, Veoh's desktop app also helps seed videos to Veoh's P2P network. The app works on both Macs and PCs.

Veoh made headlines last year when it made 3,000 videos available for download to iPods. The site recently passed Metacafe in monthly page views, although both lag far behind market leader YouTube.

Overall Veoh has a lot of promise and is gaining market share. A few high profile partnerships with TV networks or Hollywood studios could make it a top destination.

 

	Founded	2004
	Funding	$12.5M April 2006
	Partnerships	TNT, Eyespot and Blip.tv
	Alexa Rank	3554
	comScore	about 100M page views per month
	What's it good for?	Long form content, downloading stuff to your iPod
	In the News	Veoh Faces Copyright Suit, Veoh offers free iPod downloads

Reel Pop Reviews: MetaCafe.com

Today we present the first in an ongoing series of video site reviews. Every week we'll be highlighting one or two video-sharing sites. Up first: Metacafe.com.

MetaCafe was founded way back in 2003, a calmer time before Tom Cruise went couch jumping and Mel Gibson still disguised his jew-bating in Aramaic.

Metacafe isn't purely a video site -- it has other community aspects, like game downloads, ringtones and podcasts. But the site did receive dramatic funding this summer, and its traffic has been steadily --if slowly -- increasing, so it's worth taking a look at.

Metacafe pre-filters all of its videos, so it's a good site to use if you don't want to be bothered with porn or violent vids. But pre-filtering also means videos don't appear right away. That's probably why the site is growing slowly (click on the traffic stats at left).

Metacafe provides a Windows-only desktop application that lets you download and manage your files. Personally I think the desktop app is unnecessary and won't contribute to the site's adoption, but it's well-designed and easy to use.

Metacafe also pays users. If you sign up for Producer Rewards, you receive five bucks for every 1,000 views your video gets. It's an interesting system that obviates pre-roll ads. The sites also reveals what other sites have embedded specific videos. Neat feature.

Overall though, the site isn't very accessible. And since it doesn't have tags -- otherwise known as keywords -- it's hard to find specific types of video. Not a very impressive showing, but here's hoping they use their funding to improve things a bit.

	Founded	2003
	Funding	$15M July 2006
	Partnerships	None
	Alexa Rank	167
	comScore	< 100M page views per month
	What's it good for?	Making a quick buck
	Any naked chicks?	Nah, but there's some lady doing karate in the nearly buff. Yes, Metacafe does have some risque content.