O La La: “French Maids” Are Cleaning up with “How to Videos”
So, we’ve been talking to some clever independent Hollywood Web producers about making money out of Web video by creating entertaining, sponsored content.
Tim Street, producer/director/writer, has developed a hit with his show French Maid TV which gets millions of streams on YouTube and other sites.
Having developed the franchise he is using the “maids” to demonstrate how to use company products and services who sponsor the show.
The “how to” video sector is really growing, as reported in the Wall Street Journal last week. One way to commercialize these videos are through sponsorships. But Tim reminds of a drawback: while the show segments live on forever, the sponsors sponsors don’t always.
Tim’s Holy Grail is to find a way to dynamically swap out sponsorship messages in his show. That would be awesome.
Oh, and by the way, the maids are not French, but I bet you figured that out.
— Andy Plesser
NBC Directs Tests New Download Platform with P2P Distribution
NBC Direct, the platform to deliver downloads of high quality programming, is opening its beta testing, according to a report in NewTeeVee.
This is different from Hulu, the joint venture of NBC and News Corp. Hulu streams flash video. NBC Direct provides a download to save and watch “true” 720 HD.
As HD files are so large, NBC will incorporate a substantial peer-to-peer component. Providing the P2P technology is New York-based Pando Networks. Earlier this month I caught up with Pando CEO Robert Levitan who explains the integration of Pando and the quickly evolving transformation of P2P technology as a “rogue application” to a legitimate protocol.
— Andy Plesser