Saw this featured on NewTeeVee and had to piggyback. Too funny. Happy Mother’s Day!

Make no mistake, Fridays are very productive here at SDG. Especially when the big boss is on a movie set in a remote location with limited (not really) blackberry reception, we crack our own digital whip to move the needle on web innovation.

Yawn. Friday is also a good day to research online video patterns. Especially when it comes to debating the best videos out there. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, MySpace did something different.

Something bold.

Something sexy.

And like the one hot girl at the tech party, nobody knew how to handle it

Today’s MySpace announcement was totally misunderstood and mishandled by the press coverage. It was too hot to handle. Read the rest of this entry »

Wrong. Very wrong. Unless you like train wrecks. The disconnect between the actors’ guild and the studio positions on new media is one of the major issues gumming up the current (non)negotiations. The AMPTP / SAG talks aren’t getting the kind of press outside of LA that the widely covered writer’s guild strike received, but the concern amongst the theatrical and TV creative communities is widespread. Casting is dead on life-support, actors are at home (not David Lawrence), studio projects are on hold and an agent friend of mine said he is telling actors that “their job is to call their SAG reps and demand that the union give up their losing fight and close a deal.” Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s make a bet.

I’ll bet that by the time you’re halfway through watching the below video your commercial instinct will suggest that what you’re watching is a piece of marketing material. I’ll also bet that you’re going to keeping watching until the video is over. It’s that good. Read the rest of this entry »

I admire Mark Cuban and not just because he helped me find God. He’s got chutzpah. His basketball team loses again in the first round of the playoffs, he fires his coach and then he goes out and writes a semi-apocalyptic blog post about the disastrous effects of web video distribution.

Cuban is working from Craig Moffett’s report for Bernstein Research entitled “And Now for the News…The Emperor has no Clothes,” which raises real questions about the economic viability of web based video entertainment content. It’s an important report because it highlights the stagnation in web economics that more people are becoming aware of and the future that this stagnation suggests. Read the rest of this entry »

Something tragically catalytic recently happened. My mom Facebooked me. She can’t program her VCR, (are we concerned that she still has a VCR?), but she can add me as a friend, tag my photos and superpoke me. This might be bad for my privacy, but it’s good for web economics.

I should qualify the use of the word tragic. It’s tragic only in the poetic sense that despite being an independent adult, I’m somewhat indignant in having my mom knock on my digital door. Read the rest of this entry »

The internet doesn’t have to sleep. But we, of the people species do.

Or at least we should if we’re planning on competing on a nationally televised game show. Case in point is the young Chase Sampson who took the red eye into LA to shoot Who Wants to be a Millionaire and biffed the first question. Poor guy should have taken a beat. I can’t help but feel bad for the guy, he’s immortalized on Youtube as part of the “one-and-out” crowd.” I guess you take the smooth with the rough when you choose to go public and put your name on the line. Oh well. His loss is our laugh. Enjoy!

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Sean Diddy Combs, a Safran Company client, gets his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame today and has been recognized by Variety as the Billion Dollar Entrepreneur. Congratulations from the digital team. Read the rest of this entry »

I sincerely apologize if I offended anyone by using the word retarded in the title of this post, but get ready because I’m going to use it again. There’s no other way to express how ridiculous it is that the video site community is so far off in standardizing their metric for view counts. It’s straight up retarded and needs to be fixed.

Disparate video view count metrics is part of an overall problem of non-standard web analytics which ultimately stunts the economics of web content.

Read the rest of this entry »