While most of the major U.S. TV networks are struggling with the idea of YouTube and dipping their toes gingerly into new areas — such as streaming their new shows over the Interweb — CBS is pushing the envelope in a number of different ways. For example, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal, the network is setting up a site just for short-form video “mashups” and other content created both by CBS staff and by viewers.
The site, which is to be called EyeLab, is designed to appeal to Web surfers who have grown used to watching and sharing YouTube video clips or user-generated tributes to various mainstream shows — such as the collection of corny one-liners from CSI: Miami that a fan going by the name stewmurray47 put together and uploaded to YouTube. The clip has gotten more than a million views, which is enough to get a network executive drooling.
Steve Safran, who writes for the excellent TV blog Lost Remote, describes the conversation that he imagines taking place at CBS after someone mentions the David Caruso clip:
Executive Three: “You mean the thing I wanted pulled down from YouTube?
Executive One: “That’s the one. Anyway, it was a big hit.”
Executive One: About one million views and counting.
(Executives Two and Three actually have $$ signs light up in their eyes)
According to the WSJ story, CBS has hired half a dozen video-editing twentysomethings to create mashups like the CSI: Miami clip — and the network also plans to find and distribute similar clips created by users and viewers as well. Hopefully CBS has contacted stewmurray47 about a job, since it was his clip that more or less gave the network the idea.
If CBS is looking for ways of using video clips to build audience interaction or interest in a show, it should take a look at what actor Adrian Pasdar is doing with behind-the-scenes video from the TV show Heroes. The actor, who plays one of the leading roles on the show, has uploaded to YouTube (using the name “buckshotwon”) dozens of clips of his fellow actors goofing around backstage, and each one gets between 15,000 and 20,000 views.
Whether CBS’s effort will be successful or not remains to be seen, but I think it is an interesting idea. Building a community around your content — or making it easy for people who enjoy that content in different ways to share it with each other — is one of the few tools that the TV networks have left (hopefully CBS will find ways of aggregating that content from wherever it is, rather than requiring everyone to sign up with yet another site).
Hat tip to LAist for the info about Pasdar and his video clips.
Given the success that some YouTube “stars” have had — with Dutch singer Esmee Denters signed to a boutique label run by Justin Timberlake, and Ysabella Brave also signed to a recording contract — it’s not surprising that some record labels would try to do an end-run around the process and create a YouTube “sensation” out of whole cloth.
That appears to be what happened with Marie Digby, a young singer who was recently signed to a recording contract with Disney’s Hollywood Records. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, the 24-year-old singer was already working with the record company before posting any of her cover versions of popular songs to the video-sharing site.
Her appearances on TV shows and radio shows, for example — which apparently occurred after they saw her YouTube videos — were booked through a record company executive, and the story says that the record label was also involved in choosing the songs she posted to YouTube.
Crass? Yes. Surprising? Hardly. As Wall Street Journal blogger Kara Swisher put it: “Hollywood lies again; also just in — birds fly, fish swim.”
For many YouTube watchers a big part of the appeal of finding someone like Ms. Digby is that they are outside the traditional star-making machinery, and are therefore more authentic and natural. To find out that this isn’t the case often ruins the magic (although Lonelygirl15 continued to be popular once it was revealed to be fake).
Ms. Digby isn’t even the first to be involved in such a scheme: last year, a Scottish singer named Sandi Thom appeared on the scene, playing songs with her band from her apartment and streaming them over the Internet, and after attracting as many as 100,000 viewers (allegedly) she was signed to a recording contract — except, of course, that she had already been signed to a contract before the performances began.
In a post on her MySpace blog, Ms. Digby maintains that the Wall Street Journal story was blown out of proportion (although she doesn’t deny that she was working with a record company before posting her material to YouTube). She says:
“Here’s Lesson 1 for me in Media - The writer will use whatever quote he wants of yours to make it fit his ‘angle’. This loser was desperate for a good story… he knew what he wanted to write before he ever even talked to me.
The guy’s angle is this : that I am a complete phony and fake and a pawn of my record label in some brilliant marketing scheme. IS this guy completely insane. You think it’s that easy? That you get signed and suddenly everything’s taken care of for you!!!??”
Ms. Digby goes on to say that:
“What hurts the most is that this loser took every genuine thing i said and made it sound like I am acting, that this whole thing is scripted. The dude is desperate to be onto the next ‘ lonely girl’ or whatever.. i’ve actually never seeen that but its obvious that’s what he wanted me to be.”
Although some commenters on MySpace and YouTube have denounced her as a fraud, a number of fans have posted comments of support.
Is Ms. Digby a fake? That’s difficult to say. Her version of events seems to be that she developed the YouTube campaign in an attempt to keep the record company’s interest, while the WSJ tries to make the case that the whole thing was orchestrated by the label. The bottom line is that we may never know the “real” story, now that YouTube has become a subsidiary of the Hollywood department of smoke and mirrors.
Jonathan Coulton — who refers to himself as an “authentic Internet superstar” — has some perspective on Ms. Digby on his blog, in which he describes her as being “clotheslined by the thin line between grassroots and astroturf.” Nice line.
I know I’m a little late to the party with this one, but I continue to be fascinated by the response to the by-now legendary video clip featuring Miss Teen USA contestant Caitlin Upton — which I have helpfully embedded here, for those of you who might (like me) have been spelunking in Romania or working on the space station last week, and therefore missed the global furore caused by her comments.
Just to recap, Caitlin was asked why a quarter of Americans can’t find the U.S. on a map, and gave such a startlingly incomprehensible answer (even for a beauty pageant) that it has to be seen to be believed. Not surprisingly, the clip made it to YouTube in the blink of an eye, and became the latest viral sensation. At last count, the video of a confused Miss South Carolina had been viewed more than 12 million times.
Interestingly enough, however, Caitlin (or her agent and/or parents) didn’t shy away from the publicity. Not only did she show up on The Today Show — where she explained that she was flustered and didn’t hear the answer properly, and then gave a somewhat better answer — but she also took part in several other events that made light of her blooper, including a geographical pop quiz put on by People magazine on its website.
As marketing consultant Bruce Clay notes on his blog, instead of hiding or trying to avoid the consequences of her blunder, Caitlin effectively took advantage of the same forces that made that blunder so notorious, in what he describes as a textbook example of “reputation management,” Internet-style.
CNN’s Jeanne Moos notes in her video on the Miss South Carolina phenomenon that in the new YouTube era, no one is safe from an embarrassing video clip, and mentions the “Star Wars Kid” — Montreal high-school student Ghyslain Raza, who videotaped himself pretending to be a Jedi knight, only to have the clip uploaded to the Internet by fellow students, much to his embarrassment. He later sued and reached a settlement, and hasn’t been heard from since.
Caitlin, meanwhile, has gotten at least as much positive mileage out of her televised confusion as she has negative coverage — much like the “Tron guy,” a sci-fi enthusiast who was much ridiculed for posting photos of a rather unflattering Tron costume he made. The Tron guy (also known as Jay Maynard) turned his humiliation into multiple radio and TV appearances, and was asked to appear at a number of sci-fi conferences and fan events.
Obviously, it’s a lot easier for an adult — or someone with PR management professionals on their side — to handle unwanted Internet attention than it was for 15-year-old Ghyslain Raza. But Jay Maynard and others have shown that there is a flipside to Internet embarrassment. Can anyone remember the name of the Miss Teen USA winner? Unlikely.
CNN — the real-time news star of a previous generation — has teamed up with YouTube, the king of “user-generated” video, to inject a little reality into the U.S. presidential debates (which are usually choreographed within an inch of their lives so that no one accidentally says what they’re really thinking). The two media giants have set up a joint venture in which average citizens will be able to submit questions, and CNN will choose two questions that will be played for the candidates during the upcoming Democratic debate.
According to a press release from the two companies, “select YouTube users” will also be in the audience during the live debate, which is scheduled for July 23 and will be moderated by Anderson Cooper. The plan is to do something similar for the Republican candidate debate, but one hasn’t been scheduled yet. According to a conference call with a CNN executive and YouTube CEO Chad Hurley, blog postings and discussion in online forums may also influence the debate.
YouTube political editor Steve Grove and Anderson Cooper describe how the video portion of the Democratic debate is going to work in (what else) a YouTube video. The YouTube Debate site joins several other YouTube “channels” related to the election: several months ago, the video-sharing site (owned by Google) set up a site called CitizenTube — which is moderated by Grove — and the site also has a channel called You Choose, where the candidates can upload videos.
Most of the candidates have embraced video to some extent, and both John Edwards and Barack Obama announced their candidacy with videos. Hillary Clinton recently recorded a video about her search for a new campaign song, in which she poked fun at her critics by using YouTube clips. But candidates have also been burned by video clips — such as the video of George Allen calling someone a “macaca,” which pretty much ended his campaign — and the public reaction to videos such as the Hillary1984 video (or the video mentioned in this blog post) is unpredictable.
For political purposes, the Internet is “a chaotic message environment,” Alan Rosenblatt says in a post onTechPresident.com, “precisely because it enables anyone, as long as they have access to a wired computer, to post their own ideas and opinions.” Sometimes that can be good, and sometimes not so much.
First it was “Brookers” – YouTube sensation Brooke Brodack, 20, who did skits in front of her web-cam and was signed to a TV development deal by Carson Daly Productions last year — and then came David Lehre, who is also developing comedy shorts and other material for MTV after his short films became popular on YouTube (Washington Post story here).
Now Justin Timberlake has signed YouTube singing sensation Esmee Denters to his fledgling record label Tennman Records, and will reportedly have her as his opening act in several European cities (she is from the Netherlands). Another female singer who calls herself Ysabella Brave has also been signed to a recording contract after a rise to popularity that has seen her video clips viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube (I wrote about her here).
Sandi Thom, a British singer who played shows in her apartment and streamed them over the Internet, was promoted as a Web sensation last year, but it turned out that she had already signed a contract before she started getting popular for the impromptu Internet shows.
In addition to Brookers and Lehre, other YouTube stars who have been signed to deals include Lisa Nova (who signed with The Daily Reel) and Little Loca (who signed to do a reality TV show with the CW network). And NBC said recently that it has signed three Web comedy stars — including one from YouTube and one from MySpace — to work on its new DotComedy website.
The TV blog NewTeeVee, meanwhile, says that William Sledd, a former Gap employee whose YouTube videos are number four on the most-subscribed list, has signed a deal with Bravo to bring his gay-themed clips to the channel’s website (the Los Angeles Times had a story recently).
I'm a technology writer with The Globe and Mail in Toronto, and this is where I blog about the collision between media and the Web. I also have a Globe blog, which is here. Send me email at mathew (at) mathewingram.com, or for more info, click the picture.
That appears to be what happened with Marie Digby, a young singer who was recently signed to a recording contract with Disney’s Hollywood Records. According to 
According to a press release from the two companies, “select YouTube users” will also be in the audience during the live debate, which is scheduled for July 23 and will be moderated by Anderson Cooper. The plan is to do something similar for the Republican candidate debate, but one hasn’t been scheduled yet. According to 
Now Justin Timberlake 
