Who said videoblogging can’t make you a living? In 2006, good friend of Next New Networks and Indy Mogul guest star Bre Pettis was a high school art teacher and all around super guy I met at SXSW, one of a literal handful of us running around with video cameras that year. Two years later, he’s got a great new series pilot, History Hacker, debuting on the History Channel. As Bre says,

The folks at History gave the producer, director, and director of photography permission to take my DIY style of making videos with lots of jump cuts and direct talking to the camera and push it forward into a longer format. It doesn’t look like anything else on TV.

Watch it (or even better, DVR it) this September 26th at 8pm and midnight, and email the History Channel or post in the forums to help make Bre the first videoblogger to get a full TV series.

Go, Bre! This couldn’t happen for a more awesome guy.

We already love Jay Leno for appearing for a week on Fast Lane Daily, and NBC for featuring Obama Girl (aka Amber Lee Ettinger) on Saturday Night Live, so it’s only natural that Amber showed up again as “the one person whose endorsement really matters” in Mo Rocca’s report from the DNC on Tuesday’s Tonight Show. The full clip’s embedded below.

Thanks again, Jay and NBC!

Read this any which way you want, the future of TV is brighter than it’s ever been.

As Bill Sobel points out on his blog, MTV turned 27 yesterday. It’s safe to say we wouldn’t have Next New Networks without MTV, so congratulations to our much bigger, older brother — or maybe our cool uncle — the channel that got millions of people like me through adolescence in the 80’s and 90’s and opened up a window to a much bigger world than the places we were stuck. I think about MTV pretty much every day in this job, as it’s hard to overstate what it did to TV.

I’ve been looking for an excuse to do this anyway for a week or two, so here’s the famous first video, Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” If it’s incongruous to post a YouTube vid, well, I’m sure most people from MTV, then and now, actually really love YouTube (and I recently discovered, in the Google/YouTube offices in Chelsea, there’s a huge photo of MTV’s Times Square studios in their main elevator. These two are destined to one day be together). But you can also watch the video on Overdrive if you prefer. They just won’t let me embed it, though I’m sure they will soon enough.

If you haven’t heard yet about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the new project from Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Serenity, and more), it’s a new 40+ minute musical in three acts that was produced independently by Whedon’s company, Mutant Enemy, and debuted on the web this week for a limited run. You can watch the three parts for free until midnight tomorrow (Sunday) on the website, or buy them in the iTunes store, where they’ve ruled the TV charts all week.

I won’t review the musical here — that’s already been done well by USA Today, NPR, NewTeeVee, Time, Salon, and hundreds of fans over at Whedonesque — but I’ll just say that as a fan of everyone involved, it’s even better than I hoped. And it plays great on anything from an iPod to a big screen — I watched all three acts on my AppleTV and definitely got the kinds of laughs and thrills you want from the best television.

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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.

My friend and former colleague, media professor Jay Newell, sent me this picture and article from The New York Times (July 1982) to remind me how skinny I once was. It’s about youth in the then new media of cable television at the company we worked at (now called MTV Networks), and one line in particular struck me as relevant to today’s new media. MTV executive producer Julian Goldberg says,

”Look at those faces,” he said, pointing to a group in jeans and T-shirts. ”At the networks, some of them would be ‘gofers.’ Here they’re directors, producers, they’re in charge.”

It’s true again today, only now it’s also true in cable TV too. Or, as my friend Mississippi Fred McDowell once said, “Here we are again, doin’ that same ole thing.”

Look around Next New Networks, and everywhere else in the internets too.

You can read the whole article here, here, or below. (more…)

It’s no surprise to the followers of Next New Networks that internet television has gone mainstream; 150 million views is hardly “niche.” But it’s interesting to me how quickly the mainstream media has made the transition to covering our piece of the rock like it’s an everyday thing. Today there were two buried stories in business sections of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, mentioning internet TV as just another story to be covered. The Times trumpeted the value of the web (and YouTube in particular) for Superbowl advertisers, while the Journal bemoaned the slowness of advertisers to climb on board (hear, hear). Only a year ago the idea of launching a political campaign with an online spot was the hottest thing since sliced bread.

No big point here, but it’s fun to realize how fast the right ideas integrate themselves into our lives as if they were there all along.

I started reading Ken Auletta’s wonderful books at the suggestion of my lifetime friend Nick Moy and have never been disappointed, especially as he switched his beat over towards media, my consuming interest. It’s rare to find a thorough reporter who’s also a compelling writer. So I was more than flattered when Herb suggested Ken talk to me about a future book he’s planning. Afterwards I walked him over to meet David Karp, someone who knows a lot more than I do.

Via Business Week:

Where TV Ads Really Resonate

By Ben Levisohn

The screen may be smaller, but the payoff for broadcasters and advertisers is bigger. People who go online to watch a TV show are more engaged with the program—and its ads—than their couch-potato counterparts, says Simmons Market Research Bureau. Simmons surveyed 17,000 people to assess their involvement in the last TV show they viewed—asking, for example, how “inspiring” or interesting it was. The answers showed computer watchers to be 25% more involved than TV set viewers. “People watching online,” says John Fetto, a Simmons product manager, “are going to a Web site to find a specific program.” The online crowd was also 47% more likely to find ads “useful” than TV watchers—and more inclined to make a purchase. Web TV watchers “only click on [an ad] if they’re interested in it,” says Darcy Gerbarg, a senior fellow at the Columbia Institute of Tele-Information. “That’s more valuable to an advertiser.