Fishbowl Worldwide Media have long been the kings of premium user-generated content (UGC) on YouTube. As we’ve previously noted, the production company has done well to turn its massive library of America’s Funniest Home Videos clips into a series of successful YouTube channel. This week, Fishbowl rolled out Final Rewind, its fourth UGC-centered channel.
Final Rewind is similar to Failblog, except viewers get twice the enjoyment as each clip is replayed in slow motion. Many UGC clips are best when played over and over, so Final Rewind allows fail fans to get a second dose of schadenfreude without having to smash on the replay button. “Failure is a concept that translates across all languages and cultures – especially in video form.” said David Beebe, VP of Fishbowl. “There are no barriers to understanding what the fail is. Fail humor is one of the most viral types of content because it is relatable, has an element of surprise and then disbelief, and ultimately, if you admit it or not, we all like watching fails because it makes us feel better about ourselves.”
7:00 AM PDT 11/1/2012 by Erik Hayden
The ceremony returns this February after a three-year break, with new producing partners, new categories, a new format and a new host.
After an almost three-year break, The Streamy Awards will be back in February as a fan-oriented show with revamped categories, a new judging panel and the promise of traditional and new media creators duking it out for honors — and the deadline to submit categories is Friday, Nov. 2.
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“We are thrilled to continue our relationship with Yahoo in developing and producing premium digital entertainment,” said Fishbowl’s David Beebe, “This season, we’ve made many creative changes, including bringing our host, Cameron Mathison out of the studio and into the field, pushing the length of the episodes to 6-7 minutes, adding multiple layers of surprises, and tweaking the way we tell the stories.”
Now, that collection of User Generated Content (or UGC) is acting as a reminder that while original programming is an up-and-coming field in the online video, some sectors of the Internet are still ruled by the cuteness of our pets and the foibles of our kids. “When you think about it,” says David Beebe, Vice President at Fishbowl, “America’s Funniest Home Videos is really ‘YouTube before YouTube’. It’s the original premium UGC brand and it’s not slowing down. We get thousands of new submissions a week…so the library is constantly renewed with fresh and relevant content.”
This is a special Digital Content edition examining the state of original video programming on the web, as well as highlighting a selection of top shows and the people behind them.
Short-form is still king. This isn’t surprising to anyone who’s spent a minute on a computer. However, it reflects where the web currently is and how audiences consume content.
“One of the most important ingredients of successful digital entertainment is to create contagious content,” said David Beebe, VP & GM/Digital Studio, FishBowl Worldwide Media, which developed a reality program called Ultimate Surprises for Yahoo.
Hosted by daytime soap star Cameron Mathison (All My Children), Ultimate Surprises helps people spring big surprises on loved ones, such as giving your wife her dream wedding.
“Ultimate Surprises offers great stories that viewers can relate to from the start,” said Beebe. “From then it’s the emotional response that compels a viewer to comment on the episode and then share it on their social graph, further than the original platform.” The series has amassed over 140,000 comments on Yahoo to date, according to FishBowl and Yahoo.
This emphasis on “social shareability” is echoed across the board.
LA TIMES By Richard Verrier
August 21, 2012, 5:35 p.m.
A young couple is about to celebrate their one-year anniversary, but the girlfriend doesn’t know it yet. When she shows up to see her boyfriend at work, under the guise that she’s going to be an extra on a film set, he surprises her with a marriage proposal. The couple then watch their own private fireworks show.
The scene, filmed recently on Dockweiler Beach in Playa del Rey, was for an upcoming episode for the third season of “Ultimate Surprises,’’ a Web series for Yahoo that has filmed in such locations as the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona, Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach and Seabridge Park in Huntington Beach.
The show is part of a wave of low-budget digital productions shooting across Los Angeles County.
“Most of our crews are between regular film and TV jobs,’’ said David Beebe, FishBowl’s digital studio vice president and general manager. “It’s a great opportunity to keep people working.”
Morgan Spurlock’s feature-length-documentary-turned-web-series Mansome isn’t the only male-oriented Yahoo original program to hit the 57-plus-million-monthly-viewer-strong online video destination this July.
The entertainment entity that will bring you Tom Hanks’ much-hyped Electric City and has brought you Ken Marino, Eric Oyama, and Paramount’s Insurge Pictures’ Ben Stiller-guest-starring Bachelor spoof Burning Love, Katie Couric’s news and interview show, Bill Maher’s special on CrazyStupidPolitics, and more is now bringing you a set of shows meant to capture the male gaze.
Yahoo’s slate targeted towards young men includes:
Stunt Nation (Debuts July 11th with new episodes airing every Friday)
Logline: Five minutes. Two Amazing Stunts. One Ultimate Show.
Produced by: FishBowl Worldwide Media with Sal Masekela, Vin Di Bona, Bruce Gersh and David Beebe as Executive Producers
Host: Sal Masekela
What’s it about? Sal Masekela invites the biggest names in action sports to the Stunt Nation Beach House to break down unbelievable clips of amazing stunts. After catching up with each week’s guest, the Stunt Nation DJ introduces the Clip Collision segment where Sal and his guest battle it out to see who found the most epic stunt of the week and sometimes even perform one. The Stunt Nationaudience cheers each clip on, then the Yahoo.com audience takes over and leaves comments to determine which clip is the most epic.
By Lucas Shaw, The Wrap, Published: June 09, 2012 @ 1:36 pm
Long before the advent of YouTube, television showrunners Howard Gordon, Rob LaZebnik and Jonathan Collier helped found Icebox, one of the first production companies devoted to web series.
Gordon, a showrunner on “24” who helped develop “Homeland,” and other Hollywood heavyweights were able to lure some of the industry’s most talented creatives - including Larry David, writers for “South Park” and Mike Reiss, a former “Simpsons” showrunner - to contribute work to Icebox.
Their timing – more than a decade ago – was unfortunate, and the company ran out of money.
“One reason I love Icebox is they were pioneers of their day and they have this library of content like our library,” David Beebe, vice president and general manager of Fishbowl’s Digital Studio told TheWrap. Beebe is referencing Fishbowl’s huge library of user-generated content, much of which comes from “America’s Funniest Home Video,” which DiBona created.
“It’s fun to partner with them and bring cutting edge, broadcast-quality shows to our Petsami audience on YouTube,” Beebe added.
YouTube’s global reach is one of the most compelling aspects of the burgeoning entertainment platform (that’s growing at a breakneck pace). A content creator can upload a piece of entertainment to the video sharing site and that piece of entertainment is then almost instantaneously available to more than 800 million users worldwide. (Rights owners can manage in which geographic areas that piece of entertainment is allowed to be seen, but geoblocking is a setting, not the default.)
Other distribution platforms simply don’t have that capability. Not television nor Netflix nor Hulu nor anyone else can beam and/or stream a show at the same time to everyone in the world with an internet connected device all at once.
That global characteristic of YouTube is how Vin di Bona’s FishBowl Worldwide Media found the host of their latest original web series and also why the company believes their latest original web series will be a success.
LindoVictoriaFracaso is the Spanish-language iteration of the CuteWinFail, a clip show in which a charismatic host that looks good in jump cuts takes viewers through a series of viral-y videos (many of which are pulled from Vin Di Bona’s video vaults, which are populated with a couple decade’s worth of funny videos submitted by individuals hoping to be seen on America’s Funniest Home Videos) and ascribes to them a label of “cute,” “win,” or “fail” (or in the Spanish version “lindo,” “victoria,” or “fracaso.”)
“We were looking for a YouTuber who spoke Spanish and had a sizeable and engaged audience to host the show,” said David Beebe, Vice President and General Manager of FishBowl’s Digital Studio. “We came across Jose by using the YouTube Charts and switched the country to Peru, where Jose came up as the number one YouTuber. From there, we reached out to him and worked on making a deal to partner with us on this show.”
Romero is on board to host, write, and produce the first 22 installments of LindoVictoriaFracaso, which Beebe and company hope will appeal to not only Peruvians and other Central and South Americans with an internet connection, but also tap into to the trillion dollar hispanic market in the US.
“The Spanish speaking market is really underserved online,” explained Beebe. “A joint Google and Ipsos OTX MediaCT study found that Hispanic internet users are more involved with video and social networks than the overall population. The study shows that 64% of Hispanic internet users visited a video site in the past month, compared with 50% of the general population. LindoVictoriaFracaso is one way to engage them with fun and funny content.”
The actress and producing partner Jessica Rhoades, through their Blondie Girl production shingle, are working on scripted and unscripted digital series.
• Meet Cute: The hidden-camera dating show will feature friends who set up their unsuspecting pals on “blind meets,” with Fishbowl Worldwide Media and Vin Di Bona, Bruce Gersh and David Beebe exec producing. Tisdale may appear in a behind-the-scenes capacity.
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