MTV Movie Awards Launched April 23rd On Yahoo!

This comes from MTV and Yahoo! Movies:

New Interactive Experience Will Showcase User Generated Creations throughout the "2007 MTV Movie Awards," And Culminate With The All-New "Best Movie Spoof" User Generated Category Live On Stage.

"2007 MTV Movie Awards" Will Broadcast Live From Gibson Theatre in Universal City, CA on June 3.

March 12, 2007, New York, NY & Santa Monica, CA – MTV: Music Television and Yahoo! Movies today announced a partnership, working with Mark Burnett Productions, to enhance the "2007 MTV Movie Awards" experience like never before by giving fans the opportunity to participate in the show via a new website on Yahoo! Movies. This year, fans will be given the chance to realize their dreams of standing on stage at the "2007 MTV Movie Awards" to accept the legendary golden bucket of popcorn in front of Hollywood's movers and shakers. Through "MTV Movie Awards on Yahoo!," aspiring filmmakers will be offered the platform to showcase their twisted genius and story-telling talent. The interactive site, launching April 23, will allow them to submit their own original movie shorts parodying films from the past year for consideration in the first ever "BEST MOVIE SPOOF" User Generated Category. The undiscovered talent will be revealed to the world during MTV's live June 3 broadcast from the Gibson Theater in Universal City, Calif.

In addition to the movie spoof award, MTV, Yahoo! Movies and Mark Burnett Productions are developing a section on this new interactive site where viewers can create their own culture of sorts – whether it's commenting on the user-generated submissions or posting photos and videos. Select content from the site will also take center stage at the awards on a "World Wide Web Wall" that will be integrated into the live broadcast, giving a voice to all the those up-and-coming filmmakers or those who simply like to quarterback from the sidelines.

Here is one of my favorites on Yahoo Video: "The Future Is Unwritten" by carlo_edriann



Spoof-off Carlo - I'll vote for your piece if you enter!

Broadcast credit: Yahoo Video

Find TV Shows In A Blinkx Of An Eye

Blinkx

(the San Francisco-based video-search engine for those of you who really need to know all the trivia) now sports a new search tool! It makes it much easier for us mere mortals to find entire episodes of tv shows, such as Lost, 24, and Desperate Housewives. Called Blinkx Remote, it offers a quick, concise way to find TV shows and related information, instead of having to wade through video-search results that include partial clips of shows, commentaries, and random collections of episodes in no particular order.

Blinkx Remote appears at the top of Blinkx search results when you search for the title of a show. It also lets you pin down the exact season and episode. In addition, it offers links to information about the shows from other online sources such as Wikipedia and IMDB.com, Amazon, iTunes, etc., in the hope of enticing you to purchase DVDs or high-quality downloads.

Suranga Chandratillake, cofounder and CTO of Blinkx says: "Within the past six months, more and more full-length television shows have arrived on the Web. And within the past three months, people have started to change the way they search for online video. Instead of just looking for highlights from The Daily Show, for instance, people are looking for ways to watch the whole show. There's been a massive increase in TV content online, and users have caught up with that reality."

Read his interview with Tracy Swedlow on ITVT 's news blog. VERY informative!

DuPont Gets Perky with Video Blogger Amanda Congdon

According to Womnibus, WOMMA's 4/19/07 weekly newsletter,

"DuPont has gotten perky with Video Blogger Amanda Congdon." For those of you who need to know, WOMMA stands BIG Woman / BIG Mama. Not PC???? All right, all right, it is the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association. This is what they say:

Member company DuPont tapped video blogger extraordinaire Amanda Congdon, of Rocketboom fame, to star in a handful of video blogs to promote DuPont products. According to a ClickZ article, DuPont is happy, thus far, with the results of the venture. According to WOMMA Board member Gary Spangler, e-business and project leader for DuPont Electronic and Communication Technologies, Congdon fans who check out the videos tend to watch all of them and are spending an average of 10 minutes doing so.

A benefit of using video blogs is the ease with which the form translates into a viral sensation. Though the videos for DuPont weren't created as "viral videos," Congdon's DuPont endorsements are being passed along via email and copied onto the blogs of enthusiastic viewers."

Smart move...especially if you can afford it! However, it's interesting to see what Amanda said about big business circa June 2006:





Broadcast credit: YouTube

The latest iteration of iTV: Interactive TV

I'll be darned...but here it is from Cassimir Medford, in Red Herring's April 10, 2007 issue:

iTV Startup Tunes in $40M

After years of failed pilots, is interactive TV finally ready to break into the prime time?

An anonymous private equity firm on Tuesday sank $40 million into Ensequence, a seven-year-old interactive video software company that is one of a small group of startups still standing in an industry that has delivered little in two decades. The Portland, Oregon-based startup, which has now taken $87 million in three funding rounds, may have finally found the formula that opens the floodgates in the interactive TV, or iTV, market, according to one analyst.


Click here to see the demo


“Ensequence came up with a just-add-water recipe for interactive TV,” Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey says. “Unlike previous attempts, Ensequence’s product scales to millions of people instantly.” Past attempts at iTV proved too costly. They required the expensive step of producing, selling, and distributing special iTV set-top boxes, or customizing iTV for each cable operator, Mr. McQuivey said.
 
This technology allows carriers, content providers, and advertisers to set up interactive video and advertising on TV, the web, and on mobile phones, without significant network adjustment.
 
Ensequence has put together a fairly long list of pilots and releases with companies such as MTV, Nickelodeon, and TV Guide, but its showcase is a deal with Major League Baseball. The company’s technology is adding interactivity to over 2,500 baseball games on baseball’s MLB.tv

Sports fans who get the premium package can juggle among six live games, get stats, and set alerts for when their favorite players come up to bat in any of the six games.

I bat out...that's more than enough for me!

Internet Boom 2.0?

Reading or watching internet pundits - yes, they are out again in force - we are heading smack into the second boom. Do I believe that? Do you believe that? To keep things in perspective (the web tv way), I'm sharing here Streaming Video Guy's coolly hilarious animated spoof:

Click To Play

In this animated piece, he mocks the countless .com companies, literally dotting the netscape (remember that?) before the internet and telecom stock bust of 2000. Hedging his bets, totally unnecessarily, he describes his handywork Blip TV thus:

"This is purely for entertainment. Everyone knows someone like some of these characters and may be one of them. There is a little of all of these guys in all of us Internet users."

You be the judge of that, right...?

Broadcast credit: Blip.tv and MakeiTV on Magnify.net.

Get The MakeiTV RSS News Reader Widget Now!

Courtesy of Grazr, which provides an easily customizable RSS reader widget for FREE, we now have our own to give away. It's up on the Million Dollar Web TV blog.




Once there, you can easily add it to your site or blog from the File submenu (shown in blue).

VERY cool - especially that it works the first time. Score one for Web 2.0. (Yes, we keep up with the hype too.) Thank you VERY much, Grazr.com!

A Video Karaoke Star Is Not Born

MyVideoKaraoke.com is such a great concept!



Unfortunately the beta execution does not do it justice...

* It takes forever for a video to start
* The site uses an embedded Windows media player. Thank you for not caring about the "rest of us."
* Clicking on the Video link gives you the following error message:

"Safari can’t open “mms://stream10.top-ix.org/mvk/1133557134_The_lion_sleeps_tonight.wmv” because Mac OS X doesn’t recognize Internet addresses starting with 'mms:,"

instead of providing a video embed code most other video sharing sites do. So I can't include any of their hilarious clips here and can't recommend them either, till they see the "flash" light.

Rev Up Your Million Dollar Beta, Gentlemen/Ladies

We keep changing/updating the index and other pages. If you are lucky, you'll see something like that:



Check out the two most interesting sections that are ready:

About Us: All you want to know about us and this site

Profit Sharing: Yes. We will share operating profits with our Channel Owners

As you can see, the site is really coming together. We are working feverishly to:

A. Finish the user interface and public/customer pages
B. Tackle all remaining issues on the admin pages
C. Run final functional tests on the public and admin pages
D. Start full-time marketing

Timetable? 4-8 weeks. Just how long can you live on the bleeding edge?

24 - This Week’s Featured TV Show on iTunes

Season 4 was also added to the store. Not sure what the big deal is, as the show is in its sixth season now...





If you want to watch clips on the show's official site instead, here is the link to Fox.com's Video Central.

It uses an embedded Windows media player, which stinks, as far as I'm concerned. Have you foxy people ever heard of Flash, cross-browser compatibility, cross-platform compatibility, etc., etc...???

The 30 Second Video Rule

by Kevin Nalts of Will Video For Food fame fits in perfectly with the subject of this blog! He is an absolutely hilarious writer, making it inevitable for me to just quote him...

"Has more than 300 short videos that have been viewed more than 7 million times, and featured on such sites as YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo, Yahoo Video, Break, Metacafe and Revver.

He is a serial runner up for contests. He was a first prize winner in the Butterfinger “FollowTheFinger.com” Everyday Moments contest. He was a first round winner of the BarterBee “Be the Bee” contest for consumer-generated promotional videos, and has been a finalist in such contests as Mentos, Dave Chappelle Show, KissKissBangBang and Panasonic. He also has created viral videos for Mentos that have been used in advertisements on such sites as Google Video and Break.com.

His self-serving “Viral Video Genius” was featured on YouTube’s homepage, and DIY Conferences is calling him a “Viral Videologist.” He really likes that title because it helps him cope with self esteem problems. He and his videos have appeared on CNN, ABC Nightline, BBC, Fox and CBS News.

In addition to creating videos, he covers the industry in this blog and as a writer for TheDailyReel. He also speaks at industry events to help video creators learn how to monetize their work, and advertisers better optimize online video.

His best 30-40 videos are in this YouTube Nalts playlist and in the Revver “Best o’ Nalts” collection. His day job is healthcare marketing via emerging channels. As a hobby, he’s passionate about online videos. Nalts also manages an online video site (CubeBreak.com).

Despite his videos’ low production value, Nalts has a background in video production and television. He attended Georgetown University, and Babson for an MBA in entrepreneurship. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and four children (and his cousin, a former Green Beret and NYPD cop… who kills stalkers for a living)." So make sure you LOL plenty for him to hear you!





Broadcast credit: Revver

TV Guide Broadband On The Prowl

TV Guide Broadband on VEOH bills itself as your online video authority on all things TV. It promises to give you the very best shows and very hidden gems on TV. Promises, promises? So how do they deliver the goods? By sifting through every channel. Just for YOU.





Want to catch up with the hottest stars? Go behind the scenes of your favorite shows? No????! Are YOU one of those History or Discovery Channel freaks who don't wear the "Made in Hollywood" label??? Cheer up - your programs are in there ... somewhere.

Broadcast credit: VEOH