Entertainment and Arts

YouTube has premiered its first full-length studio film, “The Princess of Nebraska,” by Wayne Wang and has garnered some 160,000 views since Friday night and a positive review in today’s New York Times by movie critic A.O. Scott.

Eat the Press editor Rachel Sklar will be leaving The Huffington Post after the election to work on her book, according to a report on Gawker today. Andy interviewed Sklar at the TimeWarner Politics 08 summit earlier this week about online video at The Huffington Post and expansions underway at the site.

User-generated content plays a central role in National Geographic’s dynamic multimedia platform, Senior VP for online content development Rob Covey told me at the Omma Global conference last month. Users can now share their own videos on the user-generated video hub Everyday Explorers, built with online community builder KickApps and recently launched in beta.

Alice Schroeder’s biography "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," released September 29, became an immediate bestseller. PR firm CJP Communications recently launched the first two segments of an eight-part online documentary series it produced, "Shaping ‘The Snowball’: Alice Schroeder on the Oracle of Omaha", to give a behind-the-scenes look at the making […]

The comedy video website Funny or Die, humor site 23/6 and The Huffington Post have teamed up to create Huff or Die, accessible at funnyordie.com/huffordie, to showcase their best political humor videos and blog posts. Funny or Die made the announcement last week.

Scott Kirsner, Editor of CinemaTech and contributor to Variety, will be one of the hosts of a conference called “The Conversation” taking place October 17-18 in Berkeley. The focus will be on the interaction of cinema, online video, and games. Andy interviewed Kirsner last week at the EmTech08 conference at MIT.

LOS ANGELES, CA — TMZ, Time Warner’s hugely popular celebrity gossip site, is expanding its video syndication agreement with NewsCorp’s MySpace. Today, MySpace is launching a new branded entertainment hub.

Leading third-party measurement firm Visible Measures announced today that it will provide online video metrics for MTV Networks 340-plus video destination sites.

ABC’s highly regarded online video player will be available for developers outside of Disney’s ABC, the network’s online video chief Albert Cheng told the Streaming Media West conference last week. CNET’s Webware contributor Dorian Benkoil has the story.

ABC Television has just introduced a sharable video player for short-form segments from its entertainment line-up. I’ve posted the player here on Beet.TV. Later tonight the company will introduce a revamped video player, with a greatly enhanced user interface.

  Not only was this past Saturday Night Live’s broadcast a big hit on television, with its biggest season premiere audience since 2001, it has created the most popular online video clip ever published by NBC, a network spokesperson has told Beet.TV.  The opening Sarah Palin/Hilary Clinton skit performed by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler […]

Michael Arrington wrote that Animoto “is one of those start-ups that has success written all over it,” and it’s hard not to be impressed by their platform. Users simply upload pictures and music and Animoto automatically makes them into a high-production quality 30-second video; longer videos cost $3 a piece or $30 a year.

I’m not sure if the expected announcement at CES of a new industry-wide system to make downloaded media work on any device will become a reality, as Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee writes today, but it is surely needed.  Here’s the take on this by Cliff Edwards at Business Week.

MySpace will allow users to upload video files of up to 512 MB from the 100 MB limit it has had in place.  It also will allow users to upload files directly from video camera to the site.

SAN FRANCISCO — Ashton Kutcher was in San Francisco yesterday at the TechCrunch 50 conference to debut his new animated video celebrity site Blah Girls.  Liz Gannes from NewTeeVee was on the scene with with her video camera and got this interview the Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg. — Andy Plesser, Executive Producer P.S. Thanks […]

The hip hop artist Consequence, who released his debut album "Don’t Quit Your Day Job" with Kanye West’s label G.O.O.D Music last year, is building his grassroots celebrity status online, he says. His Kyte channel "ConsTV" has received 1.4 million hits and his Web site itsthecons.com, started in the Winter of 2007, will be finsihed […]

The first blockbuster web series has yet to be born, as Brian Stelter observed in his “New York Times” article Sunday, but there are plenty of content creators trying to change that. Santa Monica-based web production company Generate launched the political satire web series “Republicrats” August 18 and will premiere the second season of dark […]

HOLLYWOOD/NEW YORK —  The creators behind "Lonelygirl15" and the UK-based "KateModern" have produced a new web series based in the LG15 universe, "LG15: The Resistance," set to premiere September 20. It’s been a long journey since the pretended non-fiction debut of "Lonelygirl15" in 2006; the creators have formed social entertainment company EQAL and raised $5 […]

Short-form video entertainment site Metacafe has a new solution to video search. It has launched a new feature called Wikicafe to let users edit the tags surrounding video content.

College Humor inked a six-episode deal with MTV last month, according to a brief report in MediaPost , and a pilot from the College Humor creators will air this fall. I interviewed CHTV Original Content Director Sam Reich and senior writer Amir Blumenfeld at the College Humor offices last week. We didn’t get any details (on […]