You won’t have heard this anytime during NBC’s TV coverage of last night’s closing ceremonies, although it is getting plenty of coverage in the news (MSNBC, NYT, WP, WSJ, BBC, LAT, CNN) but Brian’s wife Eowyn emailed us all yesterday with the happy news that our friend Brian Conley and seven other US citizens who were detained in Beijing last Tuesday have been released and were being deported back to the US, to arrive in Los Angeles this morning.

Brian and the others, including James Powderly, an artist who works with Eyebeam here in New York, had been in custody for several days without word before Eowyn heard that they would be held for ten days, until August 30, as punishment for being involved (in Brian’s case, simply documenting as a citizen journalist, like many of the accredited reporters on the scene, who were not arrested) in a protest by Students for a Free Tibet, but likely due to advocacy and pressure from their friends and family and the resulting media attention, they were released 6 days ahead of schedule.

I’m happy to hear they’ll be back with their friends and families soon after a scary week — and I can’t speak for anyone else here, but this has highlighted for me the freedoms we take for granted here: freedom to organize and demonstrate, to protest for a cause, to get due process (and a phone call) when arrested, and to film and document what’s happening in a public place (not to mention, to make silly videos about our presidential candidates) — all of which have had limits imposed in our own country in recent years in the name of security. With the elections heating up this month and both parties’ candidates staking out their platforms, I hope that doesn’t get lost as an issue. Freedom FTW in ‘08.

If you watch any of our networks you’ve probably seen the promos for NITE FITE, our new series, which went live today, and will be available across our entire super-distribution network. The team here’s also put together a great new website for you to join the fite. Here’s the first episode, Sell Out:

NITE FITE is the first animated talk show on the web — an original animated series from Dan Meth and Mark Vitelli. Nite Fite’s hosts, Penalty and Lloyd, promise non-stop hard talk (and intensity!) every week. The initial run is for 20 episodes, through November, with a sponsorship from Starburst. We’re really excited to have them on board — and as of this week, you can sneak preview the first three episodes of the series at Starburst’s brand new website. Just look for the link for NITE FITE on the main menu, after the introduction.

Co-creator Dan Meth recently finished his initial run of The Meth Minute 39 on Channel Frederator, which was a massive success, with over 20 million views over 39 weekly episodes, and we’re really excited to work with him and Mark on the new series. The series is actually a spin-off, based on Meth Minute 39’s fifth episode.

We hope you’ll check out the show today at your favorite video destination, and if you like it, please rate it, favorite, subscribe and tell your friends! We’ll have new episodes every Thursday nite at 11pm.

After the jump: watch a video of Dan Meth launching Nite Fite this morning. (more…)

We got a nice shot in the arm this week when TubeMogul published their first monthly list of the Top 40 publishers using TubeMogul, which put Next New Networks at #1 among great company like Tornante / Vuguru (#5), MyDamnChannel (#9), Ford Models (#10), CBS Interactive (#11) and HBO (#12). TubeMogul’s list ranks the performance in viewership of videos uploaded using TubeMogul’s service to super-distribute their content to various participating sites including YouTube, Veoh, Blip.tv, Yahoo, and many others. I’m sure it rewards prodigiousness of output, and certainly the performance of independent producers like Chris Pirillo (#2), iJustine (#7), Nalts (#8), and Rocketboom (#12) are testament to that fact — they’re giving new media companies like us and Tornante and major labels as big as CBS, Warner Brothers (#33), FOX (#34) and Sony (#40) a run for their money with a fraction of the investment.

Today, we also announced that we’ve added three new partnership deals with Yahoo!, Hulu, and Metacafe, making us the leading superdistribution network on the web, with over twenty signed partnership deals (the release includes a nice quote from Brett Wilson at TubeMogul about us having “risen to the top”). It’ll be fun to see how our stuff does on Hulu, where SNL and Family Guy clips are popular, which bodes well for some of our original stuff on Barely Political and Channel Frederator. I recently was on a panel at OMMA with Hulu’s Kevin McGurn and a few others and liked how he talked how they curate and program the site — it was hard not to spill the news we’d be partnering with them right there. And we already have had a few breakout hit episodes and a growing monthly audience on Metacafe and Yahoo, where we’ve been experimenting with distributing for a while — it’ll be exciting to be able to build sponsorship and advertising programs that can incorporate those audiences.

It’ll be interesting to see what the next year holds for superdistribution. We’ve already learned that it’s not enough just to put your content everywhere with syndication and distribution tools like TubeMogul and Blip.tv. There’s a lot more that we do, with the support of our partners: following all kinds of metrics, from video views to commenting and favoring to the ratio of on-site vs. off-site (e.g. embedded player) viewership; building editorial relationships with our partners; doing a lot of outreach to viewers, bloggers, and media to try to build repeat viewership and subscriptions. We’ve also pursued relationships with more specific destinations where our networks’ viewers might be, for example, Streetfire with our automotive networks, and Craft, Etsy and Threadless with ThreadBanger.

The next step, of course, is developing sponsorship and advertising models that put the power of the superdistribution network to good use. One sponsor that’s already along for the ride is Janome, which recently began a six month sponsorship of ThreadBanger, and who sees their sponsor integration ride across ThreadBanger’s many points of viewership across the web, from our website, iTunes and YouTube to our latest partners, with each one that we add increasing the value of their investment in us. We plan to have a lot more good news to share on similar fronts in the coming months.

It was two years ago, this June, that Next New Networks actually started in the apartment of Fred Seibert, who had been incubating the idea with Emil Rensing (they had Channel Frederator and VOD Cars up and running when we met). In Fred’s apartment that day, a partnership was born as Tim, Jed, Fred, Emil and I all agreed that a company super-serving communities or targeted niches with “networks” on the internet (we later called them “micro-networks”) was a worthwhile pursuit, and worth raising VC money to do so. It wasn’t much later that our lead VC, Spark Capital, led by Dennis Miller, got on board, and then others, and by the end of the fall we were up and running.

During the time we’ve been operating we’ve accomplished a lot. We championed a new distribution method, “super-distribution” (as Fred said when we first used the phrase, “Who doesn’t want to be super?”), and that meant that our networks’ shows would be seen not just on their own URLs but on as many as twenty other partner platforms from YouTube to Veoh to Tivo where people were going to watch new kinds of video, and breaking the hegemony of the TV networks. And now many others, including the big networks, are on the super-distribution bandwagon.

While we were championing new distribution models, we were evangelizing to ad agencies and clients that they too should get “super” and embrace the idea of having their ads go to where the audiences are and innovate with us in distribution and ad integration. Movie studios like Lionsgate and Paramount were the first in, as well as car endemics and then non-traditional advertisers like the sewing machine company Janome, who saw loyal communities like Threadbangers DIY fashionistas as smart investments and came on board as sponsors. We’ve got more to do but we’ve put a lot of time into moving advertisers from “huh?” when we first started talking super-distribution to “uh-huh!”

And we identified key talent, next generation filmmakers, who can do some combo of directing, producing, writing, hosting and marketing — or simply do it all. People like Erik Beck at Indy Mogul, Rob Czar and Corinne Leigh at Threadbanger, Ben Relles at Barely Political and Mike Spinelli at Fast Lane Daily. Passionate folks who love what they do, and it shows. It’s these kinds of people who helped us launch 16 networks, some of which thrived and continue, and others that didn’t and wilted away. But that’s ok — that’s entertainment — and we’re happy where we are today with close to a dozen strong and more to come.

All of which leads me to reflect on our needs for the future. This spring we closed our second round of funding, bringing in great investors like Goldman Sachs and Velocity Interactive, to join Spark Capital and Saban Capital who participated in both rounds. With a newly bolstered board, I was named Chairman to go with my CEO title, and that’s given me an opportunity to think even bigger about our company. And to that end, I decided, with the board and my partners’ approval, to look to bring in a CEO to run the day to day of Next New Networks.

Thus far, we’ve been video-centric, built our network model, and got distribution and advertising up and running. Now, I want to see us go beyond video by building up our web capabilities in key categories, and move the company to make our sites and new offerings even more robust for communities to gather and interact. Hence, I plan on bringing in someone as CEO who has “been there, done that” in building a web business, and who will work with me as Executive Chairman.

More to come. I’ll keep you posted.

Moblogic.tv is live today, and our friends at CBS Interactive — the producing team that brought you Wallstrip — really knock it out of the park with an unique, well-paced show and a brilliantly executed website with a big, beautiful (Blip) Flash player and a design that makes sharing and stealing the show easy. We’ll be watching and taking notes - I already see much I want to steal (we’ve been moving in similar directions — check, for instance, the redesigned Veracifier website). Congratulations to Lindsay, Adam and Jeff, who have been working hard on this show for quite a while.

If you’re in Austin for SXSW, be sure to check out Lindsay on my panel, Quit Your Day Job and Vlog, where we’ll hear how she got into vlogging, and what it’s been like for her to make the jump from indie Wallstrip host to producing a daily news show for CBS.

Here’s the first episode, below.

It was a great weekend for politics here at NNN. This weekend we were all over the moon to see our very own Amber Lee Ettinger aka Obama Girl make a cameo in the opening of Saturday Night Live’s return episode after the Writer’s Strike. To quote Barely Political’s creator Ben Relles it was ‘beyond exciting’. Great job Amber and Ben.

And as the icing on the cake Noam Cohen in the New York Times did a great piece on Josh Marshall today and his winning of a George Polk Award. As soon as bloggers are considered, we know Josh will be up for a Pulitzer.

Josh- Our Man of the Year

Veracifier’s star Josh Marshall and TPM won a George Polk journalism award yesterday for their reporting on the federal prosecutors firing scandal in 2007. Traditional journalism accolades such as the Polk underline that bloggers like Josh are proving the success of old fashioned gum shoe journalism through the medium of new media. A huge congratulations to TPM. We continue to be proud to be associated with them.

I know people love Obama Girl, but today it hit new heights — Amber’s made the front page of Newsweek.com and MSN.com with Barely Political’s latest video, Super Obama Girl, released today.

This is not a doctored image — the video’s embedded right on the front page as an exclusive, along with a Newsweek interview with Amber.

Brian Braiker of Newsweek writes — again, this is an actual quote:

Watch as Super Obama Girl, blasted by the senator’s ray of hope, does battle with the “forces of darkness,” which apparently include both Chuck Norris and Bill Clinton… It’s enough to make you, regardless of your politics, pray for an Obama victory — and four more years of Ettinger.

I can’t add anything, except… wow. Ben, Amber and Leah, you’ve done it yet again. Here’s the video.

With the new year craziness, I don’t think we’ve had a chance to properly roll out the welcome mat or celebrate this, but recently Corinne and Rob of ThreadBanger renown have made the big move from Florida to New York, following the trajectory of other awesomely talented people like Erik Beck, Justin Johnson, and Scott Moschella that we’ve managed to entice here, despite cold winters (well, not today), ridiculous rents, and near-constant giant monster attacks. We’re a little used to seeing Rob and Corinne around, since they’ve visited here probably more than any other producers, but the last few days it’s been great to run into them around the offices and realize they’re not leaving.

I can’t wait to see what kinds of great things happen with them sharing space with Indy Mogul and Channel Frederator, to name a couple networks (and maybe they’ll finally improve Derek D’s wardrobe on Fast Lane Daily), but until then, it’s as good a time as any to point out their awesome end of 2007 episode, where they counted down some of the amazing moments of their first almost-year. Though I might have to fight with some people on the forums for the biggest fan title, I’m really proud to be ThreadBanger’s first fan, if only because I got to see their first episode before anyone else (that I know of). Congratulations, Thread Heads, and welcome to the Big Apple. We’re so glad to have you here.

The sweet scent of victory. Yesterday’s Iowa Caucus was a huge one for the NNN political team. Our boy Obama won the Iowa caucus- and with her video gaining a million views in just over 24 hours, the Obama Girl herself gave her victory address this morning:

We’ll be watching out for our invitation to the inauguration. Meanwhile Veracifier had an unprecedented number of people reporting on the ground in Iowa- surely an internet first. Through our ground hounds partnership with the Uptake we posted multiple reports throughout the day, including most of the major candidate’s pre Caucus rallies:

and stories from across the state, like Hound Chuck Tomlinson’s take on the media blitz itself:

The Uptake itself streamed live video throughout the Caucus, and it was all done by the seat of our pants, with everyone surprised by both the quality and amount of reporting we were getting in from all of Iowa. Bring on New Hampshire!