Sponsoring Web video series ... Sundance Screens Online ... Capturing Performance ... Brightcove CEO on TV's Future

- The PuppetVision blog has a great piece on supporting Web video series with sponsorship, an idea I talk about glancingly in "The Future of Web Video." Andrew writes:

Some puppetry artists feel that using their work to sell products and services is too crass and commercial. I respect that point of view, but puppets pitching products was a common practice in early television...and it was often really entertaining too! It's how the Muppets paid most of their bills in the 1950s and 1960s. I don't see why it can't work for web video. Actually, I know that it can from my own experience.



Back in 2000 a few puppetry friends and I did some experimenting with a directly-sponsored web series called The Marshall and Buck Show. Looking back now the show itself was very crude, but the business model did work. Although it didn't last long enough to turn a profit (our sponsor was wiped out when the dotcom stock market bubble burst about four episodes in), it did pay enough to cover the rent on a small studio and take care of small production-related expenses. If the online advertising market hadn't imploded who knows what might have happened?

- The Sundance Channel is launching an online screening room within the videogame realm of Second Life. The first film to screen? `Four Eyed Monsters' by Arin Buice and Susan Crumley.

- Also from Variety: a look at the increasingly close relationship between visual effects technology and acting, mostly focusing on 'Dead Man's Chest.'

- Here's a video clip from Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire's address at the fall 2006 Video on the Net conference in Boston.