Blog
Posts from March 2009

On March 28, 2009 at the Wadsworth Theater in Los Angeles, new media changed. At the first annual Streamy Awards, over 1300 people came out looking their best and took part in an event that moved online video -- or at least a part of it -- into the realm of Hollywood-style entertainment.

There was a red carpet, lots of press coverage, and a ceremony that looked very much like something you might see for the Emmy Awards. There were celebrities, new content creators, and familiar faces from our travels that looked energized, surprised, and in some cases, not entirely sure what to make of the whole thing. In fact, it's taken me a couple of days just to process everything and get a perspective on the evening.

» continue reading


We came, we interviewed, we edited! During the three days of PBS's SXSW online video studio, we shot 31 interviews, featuring an all-star assortment of filmmakers, online video creators, and social media visionaries. They're all handily embedded above in the YouTube playlist player (click the control button to the right of the "play" button to bring up a menu). Our interview with Felicia Day has nearly 70,000 views alone!

» continue reading

It's conference season, and this week both Zadi and I will be on a panel at NXT STAGE 09. If you're in L.A. and interested in digital entertainment, they have a nice lineup of speakers and two days worth of panels.

Tubefilter's Brady Brim-DeForest was kind enough to ask us to join a panel he is moderating called "Transforming Organic Community into a Sustainable Brand." We'll be paneling it up with two other awesome people, Kim Evey, the producer of the ridiculously popular The Guild and the hilarious Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, and Miles Beckett, Co-founder & CEO of EQAL, the studio behind the lonelygirl15 universe of shows, and the forthcoming Harper's Globe created with CBS. Nice company!

If you'll be at the conference, please stop by and say hello! Here's the info for our panel:

Transforming Organic Community into a Sustainable Brand
March 25th at 2:45pm


Renaissance Hollywood Hotel & Spa
1755 N. Highland Ave
Hollywood, CA 90028
Phone: 800-769-4774
Fax: 310-551-3395

This an industry conference targeting specifically pre and post-production executives as well as programming executives from the film/tv production sector. The premise of the conference is that there are significant number of trade shows/conferences that address the commercial and technical aspects of the content markets yet very few that focus on the creative/production aspects. Think about Digital Hollywood and the number of panels that were dedicated to the pure logistics of ad serving! As a result, while the business models and technologies have rapidly evolved, the creative process has been left lagging behind. The writers, producers and programming executives have not been told that they, too, are stakeholders in this new digital world. This is the opportunity for the platform solution providers and the distributors to bring the creative production community into our evolving digital world.

The Streamy Awards are designed to recognize outstanding achievement for shows produced originally for broadband distribution, and we're thrilled that EPIC FU is nominated in two categories, Best Hosted Web Series, and Best Host!

This is the Streamy's inaugural year and they held an open nomination process that received over 100,000 submissions. Three of the top industry blogs that cover online video are behind the Streamy's, GigaOm's NewTeeVee, Tubefilter, and Tilzy.TV. They've done a bang-up job with the site, and the official nominees were announced on March 14.

The International Academy of Web Television is the voting body behind The Streamy Awards, and Zadi and I are extremely honored to be among the inaugural Academy Members. Our fellow members are all very accomplished and influential in their respective fields, and we are all pleased that online video is taking bold steps forward as it gains more and more notoriety in the mainstream.

Kudos to Drew Baldwin, Brady Brim-DeForest, Joshua Cohen, Marc Hustvedt, Liz Shannon Miller, and Jamison Tilsner for their tireless work to put all of this together. Join us at the ceremony and gala on March 28th at the Wadsworth Theater in Los Angeles!

We're really excited to be working with PBS this year for SXSW!

From Zadi's blog post about it:

We'll be working with PBS and partying it up at the PBS Interactive Social Media and Online Video Studio, so make sure to drop by! We'll be interviewing and hanging out with filmmakers, interactive visionaries and online producers, and generally people who are doing awesome stuff! We'll also be running around the convention floor, so if you see us, pull us over and say hi!

PBS HQ for this year's SXSW will be at 406 E. 6th Street (2 blocks from the convention center). We'll be there Saturday, March 14th - Monday, March 16th, from 12-6pm. Happy Hour starts at 6pm, and at 6:30pm we'll have Live performances by Paul Dateh, David Kitchen, and Alejandro Escovedo

If you can't make it to SXSW, don't worry, we'll be streaming it ALL Live at http://pbs.org/sxsw. We'll also be tweeting throughout our stay, so you can get updates of our adventures at http://twitter.com/pbsengage, http://twitter.com/zadi, and http://twitter.com/stevewoolf.

Zadi will also be on two panels. Friday at 3:30pm, Room 18BCD: How to Rawk SXSW: The Basics, and Saturday @ 5:00pm, Room 12AB: The Ten Worst Social Media Campaigns. We're also glad to have the help of Rick Rey to help us keep our head above water with the PBS interviews!

Hope to see you there!

Check out a new series we created for Next New Networks' WePCtv network, called Hacking Hollywood! It's sponsored by Asus and Intel, and we had a great time shooting it.

We wanted to take a look at some of the ridiculous (or awesome) tech shown in Hollywood movies and tv shows and get some savvy online peeps to sit down and give us their thoughts about it. If you've ever seen Best Week Ever or I Love the 80's on VH1, you'll quickly recognize the format. It works really well on the web, especially when you're lucky enough to have smart and funny people on camera being themselves.

» continue reading