David Duchovny is the voice of a alcoholic polar bear caught in a nightmarish version of present day Hollywood. “Ice, ice baby. Go with the flow.”
You could head down and catch this gem at the Tribeca Film Festival. But through May 17th, the fest’s marvelous shorts will be screening five at a time in the Read More
A lot of the stories on the future of “social” TV focus on the idea of a real-time conversation happening online, with viewers sharing thoughts and jokes while taking in their favorite shows. But New York startup GetGlue, which hit the million user mark today, is seeing something a little different.
“The last thing you want is some variant on an old AOL chatroom, with tens of thousands of people talking about a program at the same time,” says GetGlue COO Fraser Kelton. “What we’re seeing is a burst of activity at the start of each program. The way we interpret that is, checking in to GetGlue has become part of the ritual of settling in to watch TV.” Read More
For a long time, web video platforms didn’t treat viewing the same way as traditional TV. Each clip was an autonomous unit. Maybe users got a few recommendations after they finished watching a video, but there was no sense of a continuous curated stream of entertainment like there is while watching network TV.
VHX, which launched today, is looking to use your social network to program your web video watching. Users open the service up to their contacts on Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, then get a dashboard of videos pulled from the friends they are following. Read More
A lot of folks are convinced that the future of television is less about sitting down and enjoying a program and more about participating in the real-time conversation around what you’re watching.
New York startup Social Guide just raised $1.5 million to build out its list of trending shows and localized hash tags Read More
Yesterday Betabeat ran down some of the growth stats being shared by Hulu CEO Jason Kilar. This morning we woke up to find Netflix has snagged exclusive rights to stream seven seasons of Mad Men at a reported $1 million dollars per episode.
The boom in these streaming video services is paying off for the hardware players who make the set top boxes that bring Hulu and Netflix to people’s TVs. Read More
The last time we heard from Hulu CEO Jason Kilar he was feeling feisty, firing off a Jerry McGuire style blog post that basically asked the networks who created Hulu to stop kneecapping the site and let them get on with the business of reinventing TV. Read More
Franchesca Ramsey and Emily Kim are still working towards their big break, now with a little help from Youtube and the team at Next New Networks.
To understand what it takes to become a Youtube superstar, with millions of followers and opportunities both on and off the web, we took a look at some of the channels with the most subscribers.
Emotion seems to trump intellect and a stream of consciousness, while cleverly edited, is still the lingua franca for popular vloggers. Read More
In the battle to build the universal screen, where anyone can watch anything from anywhere so long as they are a paying customer, Time Warner has gone into retreat. Read More
In the basement of the Crosby Street Hotel, Kiefer Sutherland munched on a miniature hamburger. He was wearing a gray blazer and pointy cowboy boots and bestowing hugs. “This all started with a challenge, which was to tell a story in five minutes,” he said. Read More
Betabeat has been busy chronicling the boom in companies focused on original series for the web. Now you can add Ken Lerer to the mix.
His newest venture is BedRocket Properties, a video studio/incubator, according to Peter Kafka at Media Memo. The idea is to build out curated verticals that Read More
