AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

LA Times Blogger David Sarno discovers online sensation Fred, here:
Last week, someone in the online video business gave me a simple tip.
“Fred,” the guy said.
“Fred?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Kids love Fred.”
I had not heard of Fred, much less known that kids loved him. But that would swiftly end. As soon as I could, [...]

[Read more →]

At his old jobs — running Paramount, and then Disney — Michael Eisner was paid to pick winners, and he did a very good job. But that track record doesn’t mean much in the world of Web video. Eisner started out on the Web with a hit: With a push from MySpace, and then Veoh [...]

[Read more →]

Variety
HBO is getting into bed with Will Ferrell’s FunnyorDie.com Internet vid venture.
Pay cabler has bought a small equity stake in the 2-year-old comedy website and has commissioned 10 half-hours of programming from Funny or Die as part of the deal.
The wide-ranging pact also envisions the two sides partnering on a host of future projects, from [...]

[Read more →]

NewsWeek
Celebs are trying a new tactic to win the freedom of Burmese democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi. Can their viral video possibly have an impact?
Kim Kardashian is an unlikely face for the campaign to free Burma. The reality TV star is better know for her sex tape and various other … well, assets. But [...]

[Read more →]

Tech Crunch

Adobe is making a big play to make Flash the de facto viewing environment not only for Web apps on your PC, but also on your mobile phone, your TV, and any other screen you can think of. It is announcing the Open Screen Project to make it easier to develop applications across devices—using [...]

[Read more →]

The Los Angeles Times
Conservators face issues in preserving video and modern material artworks.
“Video is a fugitive medium,” said Getty Research Institute’s Glenn R. Phillips, and he should know. As curator for “California Video,” running at the Getty through June 8, he enjoyed the luxury of a massive archive produced during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. [...]

[Read more →]

paidContent.org
It’s become fairly typical for major ad agencies to get into content creation under the premise of producing branded entertainment on behalf of clients. But it is unusual for a public relations shop to try its hand at the practice. New York-based PR firm Edelman hopes to widen the perception of itself - if not [...]

[Read more →]

LA Times’ Webscout, David Sarno

IT was Jessica Rose who gave this funny little genre its first hit, way back in 2006. Lonelygirl15, if you’ll recall, was the headline-grabbing video diary of a pretty teenager, later exposed by net detectives (led by the Los Angeles Times’ Richard Rushfield) as a brilliant, CAA-backed fiction. The lonely girl [...]

[Read more →]

Wall Street Journal
Civil servant Mark Thompson wants to turn the British Broadcasting Corp. into an empire on which the sun never sets.
To do that, the BBC’s 50-year-old chief executive is determined to get the world to watch more British drama, comedy and news online. His push has required radical job cuts and new business strategies [...]

[Read more →]

Jeff Pulver Launches PrimeTimeRewindTV Alpha - Mashable
Jeff Pulver, Internet pioneer and founder of Network2 TV has put out a new web destination site dedicated to online TV viewership, this time for mainstream embedded TV programming that can be found publicly on the web. Chris Brogan alerted me this afternoon to the blog post Pulver put [...]

[Read more →]