Entertainment and Arts

HOLLYWOOD, Calif — After inking a deal with portal DailyMotion to fund the pilot for his latest online series, Web star Hayden Black tells Beet.TV the site is now pitching potential sponsors for the show.

HOLLYWOOD, Calif — With many more entertainment choices for consumers, television producers have to work harder to keep up, the noted TV showrunner Greg Berlanti told Beet.TV at the NATPE LA TV Fest.

HOLLYWOOD, Calif — In an effort to expand its online reach with teens, Alloy’s Teen.com portal teamed up with Fox Searchlight to run a series of Webisodes to support the upcoming flick “Post Grad,” Alloy’s Jamie Elden told Beet.TV at the LA TV Fest in earlier this month.

Showtime’s top-rated comedy “Weeds” has seen strong online results for its newly launched original companion Web series, Beet.TV has learned.

Rainbow Media’s IFC.com plans to introduce an original Web series each month from July through November, the company told Beet.TV.

NEW YORK, NY — Akamai has returned to the Cannes Film Festival this year, powering the video distribution of film trailers and event coverage, but this time in HD quality. 

Hollywood production studio Endemol (producers of “Deal or No Deal”) has teamed up with MySpace to produce the online interactive reality series “Married on MySpace” kicking off this week on the site.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — You might think of YouTube as the site for viral videos and your cousin’s birthday clips, but the giant of the Web video world is on a mission to change that perception, YouTube spokesperson Chris Dale told Beet.TV in an interview at the corporate parent Google’s headquarters on Tuesday.

Showtime is the third most viewed entertainment channel of all-time on YouTube and the premium network relies heavily on the viral video site as a marketing platform.

Big trial gets underway on Friday (4.24) in San Francisco about the DVD-ripping program from RealNetworks called RealDVD.  Hollywood is not too pleased with the $30 program which allows you to rip and save unlimited number of DVD's to a PC.

Showtime will debut the full-length version of Edie Falco's new series Nurse Jackie, online in June before its first showing on the premium cable service.

"SeeqPod, the popular 'playable media' search service that many music sites use as the foundation for their core offering, has filed a petition for Chapter 11 yesterday….

HOLLYWOOD — We couldn't get to the Streamy Awards in LA on Saturday night, but Lon Harris of Mahalo Daily was on the "red carpet" and filed this report.   

SeeqPod, the search engine that crawls the web for "playable search results" like music–including pirated files–is under fire from the record companies again.

Watching a remarkable online video documentary by Dai Sugano, a gifted multimedia editor at the San Jose Mercury News, the slums of Mumbai are as bad as they appear in Slumdog Millionaire, the highly acclaimed film which is favored for winning Best Film award at the Oscars tonight.   

Overlay TV, the one-year-old start-up that allows users to overlay any links, images, text bubbles, and widgets into their videos, is opening its API to software developers, the company announced yesterday.

We were excited to see Gary Vaynerchuk, the host of Wine Library TV, reveal the best wine's for Valentine's Day love on The Today Show this morning.

Next New Networks received 300 million video views in 2008–three times more than in 2007, CEO Lance Podell told me at the AlwaysOn conference last week. We're betting Obama Girl helped boost those numbers quite a bit,

At Beet.TV, we cover a lot of stories around online video, but a reverse phenomenon is going to reach half of the television homes in America this year, according to Dalen Harrison, CEO of interactive TV company Ensequence.

Savory Cities, the restaurant website that profiles restaurants in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle, has the largest library of editorial restaurant videos on the web, Co-Founder Chris McBride told Andy in an interview  last month.