Years ago I had a VHS tape in my possession about the history of the New York Knicks (NBA basketball team for anyone unaware). I watched this tape dozens of times, as I was an absolute die-hard Knicks fan (until they abandoned Patrick Ewing and the owners ran the team into the ground, but that's a story for another time). On this tape was an interview with Bill Bradley, who played the position of small forward and was a core member of two championship Knicks teams in the early 1970's. Bradley was discussing the two championships in 1970 and 1973 and remarked about something that always stuck with me: what he was most proud about was being a member of a special team for a period.

Someone up there is smiling on us, because last Tuesday we woke up to discover that we were nominated for the Webby Awards on Online Film/Video for the third year in a row for EPIC FU. Not only that, we received two nominations, one for Best Reality/Variety Host, and one for Best Variety series.

In case you're not familiar with the Webby Awards, this is the 13th year of the event. The gala will be hosted by Seth Meyers from Saturday Night Live for the second straight year. Here's a snippet from their website:

Hailed as the "Internet's highest honor" by The New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile web sites. Established in 1996, the 13th Annual Webby Awards received over 10,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide. The Webby Awards is presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Photo by The Bui Brothers.

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.

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!

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.

We don't post often to the Smashface blog because we're usually busy making content and staying involved with the online video community. But when we do post something, it usually has to do with a major event or announcement. This falls into that category.

Seems like we just posted the announcement about EPIC FU joining forces with Revision3 in a web licensing deal, but about a week ago Revision3 let us know that despite a year of record revenue and viewership, they are feeling the effects of the economic crunch and need to make some urgent and tough decisions. As of the end of 2008, Revision3 will no longer be the web licensing partner for EPIC FU, and we'll be leaving their network of shows. We wish Revision3 luck in the coming months and remain a fan and supporter of their shows.

There's been some well-documented contraction in the tech world lately, and the online video sector is feeling the effects. A harsh fourth quarter downturn in advertising sales combined with the decrease in licensing revenue for EPIC FU means that Smashface has also had to scale back by laying off three members of our production team. If you're looking for talented production personnel, Zadi and I heartily recommend getting in touch with Rick Rey, who produced 30+ episodes of EPIC FU and has been involved in creating the show for over a year. We will also miss Sarah Atwood, who co-produced over a dozen shows with us, and Daniel Merlot, a talented and versatile editor.

As we have since June 1, 2006, we will continue to produce the show each week and our long-term goals remain the same: find the best partners to grow and expand the EPIC FU brand across different mediums. With over 30 million views across the web since we launched, we know we've only scratched the surface of what we can do with this show. Although this economic climate is likely to stay with us for an extended period, the future of online video is too large to be permanently affected by this tough time.

On August 16 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Zadi and I are privileged to have been invited to give a keynote address for the 2008 New Media Expo, now in its fourth year.

Big thanks to Tim Bourquin and Emile Bourquin, the founders and organizers of the Expo (a.k.a. the Podcast Brothers). We've attended the past two years and watched the video community assemble from across the country and chat it up in the halls. Now that the event is being held in Vegas, it should be quite the party, and we should see tons of new faces descending into Sin City to find out more about this whole new media thing.

Our friend and colleague Sunny Gault of L.A. New Media will interview us on stage for the keynote, so it'll be more casual than a traditional address. And we'll leave time at the end of the keynote for questions from the audience. Sunny is working on setting up a live video stream of the interview, and I'll post an update here as we find out more about it.

I'm pleased to announce that Smashface signed an agreement with Revision3 to exclusively licensing and distribute EPIC FU across the web! Wait, what -- oh -- you mean, you've already heard? And saw it here, here, and here???

Yeah, I guess you can call this blog post long overdue, but we are thrilled to be working with the folks at Revision3! They've been doing the online video thing going all the way back to 2005, and the core fans they brought with them from TechTV have built a really passionate audience.

The deal between us got finalized very quickly, and we've been so busy creating two shows a week that we've barely had time to keep up with everything else! I've had this blog post on my to-do list for 3 weeks already.

But now we're starting to scale our show, with Rick Rey as a full-time producer, Sarah Atwood co-producing, Annie Tsai as our production assistant, and a couple of freelance editors pitching in, too. We have big, big plans, and we're glad to have a company like Revision3 on the same page with us, helping us get to our mutual goals.

Ok, enough talk. Back to work! http://smashface.com/blog/2008/07/omg1-epic-fu-revision3.php http://smashface.com/blog/2008/07/omg1-epic-fu-revision3.php Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:54:22 -0800

Judging by the number of inquiries we get every day asking about EPIC FU from our truly amazing viewers, a lot of you have noticed that we haven't posted a new episode of the show since late March. We'll be back in about a week, but the hiatus we've taken has allowed us to refuel the creative gas tanks and think about the future of the show.

As we come up on the two-year anniversary for EPIC FU in early June, we can't help but think about how much the show has changed over the years. The early JETSET episodes were constituted as a variety and sketch show. We spent those first nine months identifying our viewers and transitioning into the format that became a resource and hangout for so many more people than we could have expected.

In March of 2007 we entered a licensing partnership with Next New Networks, and in the past year EPIC FU has come into its own. We benefitted from the advertising relationships they created and from their super-distribution strategy, which helped us bring in audiences at video hosting sites across the web. We were always on the same page about the importance of creativity, community, and interactivity as core elements of everything related to the show.

We're really proud to be able to say that EPIC-FU is nominated for a 2008 Webby Award in the Variety category of Film & Video! It's really exciting because we won the People's Voice Webby Award in 2007 for JETSET, which would eventually evolve into EPIC-FU.

Zadi, Rick, and I have all worked very hard to make a show that strives to be consistently creative and entertaining, as well as a resource of information and a tastemaker for our audience. We have some very tough competition this year, including our friend Alex Albrecht's show The Totally Rad Show, along with Tom Green, The NY Times, and our friends at Good Magazine.

If you watch the show and you like EPIC-FU, please take a couple of minutes to vote for us for the People's Voice award. If you're registered and logged in, you can click this link to go directly to the form. Otherwise you can find us by going to pv.webbyawards.com and going to Film & Video and voting in the Variety category. Thanks!

And a special thanks to Rick Rey, our erstwhile associate producer who gets very little of the credit for his work on the show, but has a lot to do with its content and creativity. Rock on, Rick!

A couple of weeks ago an EPIC-FU episode was featured on the home page of YouTube thanks to the generous selection of their editors. We expected to get a nice amount of views, but we never expected the episode to move past 3 million views when all was said and done. In fact, the episode is still compiling about 10-20,000 views per day as of the time of this writing.

We're obviously very happy that the show is resonating with the largest community of web video aficionados on the Internet. It's gives us a great sense of validation to know that we created a weekly show that can generate those kinds of numbers. Not easy to do these days.

What was especially interesting to us was to watch this video run away from all the other videos that were featured on YouTube at the same time as us. No other video crossed the million mark during the week we were featured. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about why that happened to try and understand the dynamics that affect viewership on popular video hosting sites.

For one thing, we've been producing regular content for a year and a half with JETSET and now EPIC-FU. So to some extent we can call the built-in audience a factor in the video's explosive views. But we didn't have a significantly greater number of YouTube subscribers than many other shows that have been featured and did not experience such a high number of views.

It's a nice inside look into a typical week in the life of these guys, who are all trying to figure out the online video landscape with the rest of us. Agents typically get a bad rap, but Barrett Garese (the "nerd" in the article, on the right of the picture below) has been our main representative for the past year and he's been a good friend and contributed a lot of creative thinking to Smashface.

A lot of other content creators ask us about our experience with an agency like UTA, and this is a good view of what things are like. The notable exception is the out-of-context quote from Ryan Reber, who is *not* always schmoozing someone.

Congrats on the awesome article, guys!

Update: the images in this post were hotlinked from the LA Weekly website and have since been removed.

The good people at Miro have worked really hard to develop their completely open source media player, and they are positioning themselves to take on Joost. They've created a great product, and we're fortunate that EPIC-FU (and JETSET earlier) have been default subscriptions for new installations for a long time. Thanks guys, and congrats on the new player!

You can check out more videos from Viral on their network channel on Veoh, or on their blog site. Thanks, Sunny and team!

PGA SEMINAR - "PREPARING FOR THE INFINITE CHANNEL UNIVERSE"

DATE: November 10th
TIME: 10:00am to 4:00pm
LOCATION: CBS Radford Studios (4024 Radford Ave. Studio City, CA 91604)

PGA Members: No Charge
Non-Members: $50
Students w/ valid ID: $20

CONFIRMED PRESENTERS INCLUDE:
YouTube.com - Head of Product Marketing Jamie Byrne
Break.com - CEO Keith Richman
Broadcaster.com - CEO Martin Wade & VP of Marketing Robert Gould
Revver.com - VP of Marketing Angela Wilson Gyetvan
Metacafe.com - Founder Eyal Hertzog
Veoh.com - Founder Dmitry Shapiro
Zattoo.com - VP of Business Development Gagan Palrecha and VP of Content Ian Greenblatt
Brightcove.com - Director of Product Marketing Sanjay Desai

In the run-up to the name change, the one thing we did not have time to properly consider was a communications plans to make our motivations clear. After all, there's really only the three of us doing all the production work, editing, and website design and development for JETSET and other projects. We've had some great support from Next New Networks helping us with the show's myriad distribution points. But the thought behind the name change needs to come directly from the show creators, myself and Zadi. We couldn't ask our partners to explain our decisions for us.

For most web shows, including JETSET, viewership varies from episode to episode. Sometimes you have a great week (like we just did), and sometimes you have an off week numbers-wise. Because consistency is so important when it comes to stats -- especially in an emerging arena like online video -- I think it's important to decrease variance as much as possible. And by that what I really mean is decrease the number of "off weeks," because a steady increase (or explosion, even) in views is never a bad thing -- as long as you can keep doing it week after week.

I thought it might be interesting to start a series of blog posts on the factors that influence variance in online video stats. I'm hoping a few of you will chime in with your own thoughts and experiences, and perhaps together we can get a better grip on the part of this industry we think we have least control over.

Let's start with a factor that many content creators are focused on, but at the end of the day doesn't play a huge role when it comes to variance: Subscribers.

In the article Casey asks if Hollywood is creating a "new" media if they bring television to the internet. Here are my thoughts on the topic at hand, and what I think Hollywood should be thinking about:

Television is not the Internet
Just like theatre wasn't radio, radio wasn't film, film wasn't television, the television is not the internet. We all watch films on our television, but it's an inherently different experience than watching it on the big screen. The same goes for the internet. Thinking about the audience experience will dictate whether or not you're utilizing the medium to its fullest capacity. A three-camera shoot is par for the course on TV, on the internet it's definitely NOT going to knock my socks off.

Many moons ago, I wrote a blog post on my personal blog site about how comments do not equate to a community. I had a lot of gripes with the lack of accountability in regular comments, the linear and inflexible nature of the tools available for commenting, and the general one-dimensionality of the experience.

For the longest time Zadi and I were watching the open source projects and commercial sites offering web community tools in the hopes that we could roll out a social component for JETSET. Drupal was the leader and the obvious choice, but quite frankly it lacked attractive templating options. It is also pretty far from a turnkey tool, or at least it was when we were reviewing packages.

Then we found Ning. We were immediately impressed by how easy it was to set up a social network site, customize it, and be up and running. In two days in May, over ten total hours, we built the MIX site that still looks the same today. Our hardcore fans could immediately begin uploading photos and videos, talk in threaded forums, customize their own profile pages, connect over common interests, interact with us about show topics and ideas, and so much more. Just like that, we had a real community.

at wired's nextfest

So first things first. Who am I and how do I fall into the Smashface equation? It's a question I get asked often. Most people don't know there is a third person working on JETSET every week. Yes, that person is me. Keep in mind Steve and Zadi do most of the heavy lifting, so my role as associate producer is more supportive than anything else. I guess you could say I fill in the gaps. Whether it be researching stories, editing, writing script drafts, playing with new apps to review, shooting feature segments, or the occasional correspondent piece -- I do whatever needs to get done. Basically, I try to make Steve and Zadi's life less hellish by alleviating some of their workload.

Smashface was founded in 2003 in New York. At that time, we were doing small-scale documentary work and doctoring screenplays. Seems like a lifetime ago.

When we came out to Los Angeles in January 2005 online video was maturing into a force to be reckoned with. After some experimentation we developed JETSET, where we were free to explore the best ways to interact with the people who watched the show.

shooting JETSET in late 2006

After a couple of months creating that show we realized we were not utilizing the concepts and tools that make web shows unique. To truly engage and interact with our audience we needed to set up the show in a way that made them a part of it. It took some trial and error, but we experimented with our format, our calls to action, and we developed a community tool that works quite well.

Now well over a year and half into JETSET, we have serious experience cultivating a community around a web show and we're going to use that knowledge to inform all of our projects going forward. And we intend to push that interactivity as far as present technology can take it, as long as it's a good experience for the audience.