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This weekend, hurricane force winds blew down thousands of trees in our location in Yonkers, NY. We are without power for, police say, up to two weeks. So projects come to a temporary pause until we figure out an interim location for our edit bays.

Our neighbor’s house was crushed by a large oak tree, then the power line sparked and burned the house down. We shot some cell phone video and gave it to our friends at Good Morning America. Here is the piece:

You can see the entire video of the fire here: http://www.twitvid.com/09F4A

We hope to find a temporary location to set up our edit bays by tomorrow!

We were shooting a promo video for the fabulous group “Random Events NY” at the Hollywood Stunt’s Training Facility and one of the participants was Jake Ray, producer and DJ for New York’s 92.3 NOW FM. Jake asked us to post his jump into the airbag. Jake, here ya go.

Easy to Assemble

Tubefilter.tv offers a rare and eye opening look into the numbers behind the Ikea sponsored scripted web series “Easy to Assemble.” The total tally? 1.9 million views … “true” and intended views, not those “auto-play” fake views MySpace was trying to sneak into it’s stats.

How did “Easy to Assemble” rack up those impressive numbers? Their most lucrative partnerships were with MyDamnChannel.com (over 850k views) and an Ikea fan site (over 500k views). If you add up the views on their traditional distribution (where most web series try to place their shows), i.e. YouTube, Dailymotion, Blip, and their own site (easytoassembleseries.com) the total is less impressive (less than 40k).

The lesson? Seek out partnerships with popular online destinations that promise to feature your show prominently. Of course, it helps if you have a show with a strong cast of recognizable celebrities like “Easy to Assemble” … but clearly even celeb wattage doesn’t attract major views if you’re trying to build your own distribution channel from scratch.

See the full TubeFilter article and all the “Easy to Assemble” views data here: http://news.tubefilter.tv/2009/10/28/how-ikeas-easy-to-assemble-broke-1-9m-views-without-cheating/

Here’s a testament to the magic of Twitter …

Through twitter.com I found out about an event for NY Social Week called “Social Media + Video = Social Entertainment” (See pix here).  It was held two days ago at the immensely creative “For Your Imagination” studio in Manhattan (follow them on Twitter here: @fyistudio),  I was mentioning to some of the folks attending that one of our clients want to add “Call to Action” buttons directly on their videos … that’s when I heard about overlay.tv.

Yesterday, I tested overlay.tv’s incredibly easy interface with the latest episode of our travel series “Trip on a Deal” (see it at the end of this post).  Around noon I posted the results on twitter with our @triponadeal account.  We were flooded with positive responses from our followers … and I received an email from overlay.tv’s VP of Marketing, Ben Watson (follow him here @bitpakkit) offering a demo “since we happen to be in NY.”  So that evening I had dinner with their VP of Business Development, Kevin Barwin (@kbarwin) … a fantastic demo, lots of ideas of how to work together, and great possibilities on how to please our clients.

Total time between tweeting about the service and having dinner with the Vice President: 7 hours.   Amazing.

On a side note: check out overlay.tv’s fascinating entry on the “Value of Twitter” and the costs of the time spent in cold hard cash here: http://blog.overlay.tv/2009/01/12/what-is-the-value-of-twitter/

- John Palacio