AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

TV duo Ripe for Web deal - The Hollywood Reporter
Online video platform Ripe Digital has signed TV writing-producing team Ross McCall and Aaron Peters to a multiseries deal.
CAA brought together clients Ripe and McCall/Peters, whose credits include “The Simple Life,” “The Tom Green Show” and creating the WB Network sitcom “Modern Men.”
The first series [...]

[Read more →]

UStream.TV Partners with Veoh - Mashable
UStream is at it again, releasing a new update today. Brad Hunstable, a founder at UStream, just contacted me via IM regarding a new partnership they’re announcing this morning with Internet Television leader, Veoh Networks. Together they’re launching Veoh’s new Web series, “Viral LIVE,” a live monthly program that gives [...]

[Read more →]

Online Video Tools Platform Magnify Closes $1 Million Funding - paidContent.org
Online video tools firm Magnify.net has raised $1 million in its second round from existing investors Next Stage Capital, New York Angels, Rose Tech Ventures, Active Angel Investors, Chris Anderson and other individual investors. Joining this round were new investors Ogden Capital and Gideon Gartner, [...]

[Read more →]

Disney Officially Launches Stage 9 with Webisode “Squeegees” - Mashable
Disney is officially launching Stage 9 Digital Media today, with the release of a new series called Squeegees. This made-for-web production studio is specializing in the short-form content that teenagers seem to appreciate when it comes to online video consumption. Instead of pouring a million dollars [...]

[Read more →]

Wikia Open Sources Social Networking - Focused Networking Now Open to All - Read Write Web
Wikia, the independent commercial wiki site founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, is releasing components of its very nice social networking toolset under the GNU General Public License 2.0.
The ability to set up an Open Source social network [...]

[Read more →]

Quarterlife Doesn’t Make The Broadcast Grade; NBC Pulls After One Episode; Going To Bravo - paidContent.org
The digital words are flying like crazy as people try to draw conclusions from quarterlife‘s one-and-done tenure on NBC and it’s likely move to cable, at least for the end of the six-episode block. What does it say about the [...]

[Read more →]

Nielsen group taps Byrne
Publishing veteran named senior VP
Publishing vet Gerry Byrne has been named senior VP of Nielsen Business Media’s newly constituted entertainment group.
In a related move, John Kilcullen, senior VP of the company’s Film & Performing Arts and Music & Literary group since October 2006, is ankling to pursue what a statement called “his [...]

[Read more →]

Creator disses ‘quarterlife’ move to NBC - The Hollywood Reporter
The ambitious experiment of transitioning Internet series “quarterlife” to TV was a failure, says the show’s co-creator Marshall Herskovitz.
A day after the drama about a twentysomething blogger and her circle of friend debuted on NBC to dismal ratings, the prolific writer and producer told an audience [...]

[Read more →]

Warner Bros. Unveils Media Lab - TV Week
Warner Bros. introduced its new state-of-the-art media lab Thursday night. The on-site research center will facilitate consumer testing for media content, including broadband, pay-per-view, video-on-demand, wireless and gaming.
The studio teamed up with Hewlett-Packard to set up eight user bays with retractable HD monitors connected to broadband Internet access, [...]

[Read more →]

Veoh aims to be one-stop shop for Net TV viewers - USA Today
Dmitry Shapiro wanted to start a website that promised to be the CBS, NBC and ABC of the Internet, a one-stop shop for TV programming on the Web.
Shapiro wasn’t the first to come up with such a lofty concept. At the time of [...]

[Read more →]