Is
Pittsburgh the next Hollywood?
Variety
reported on Sunday that former MTV VJ and current NBC late night talk
show host Carson Daly will team up with Madison Road Entertainment to
produce a daily five-minute webcast, The Really Big Internet Show,
starting in July that will spotlight the most original online videos
of the day. This is Daly’s second venture onto the World Wide
Web, having previously developed an online video pilot, It’s
Your Show, for NBC. “We spent many hours trying to convince
the people at NBC that content online was rich material, a force to
be reckoned with,” Daly told Variety. “It’s
Your Show was our attempt to focus on user-generated content by
offering money. But our timing was off. But I’m such a believer
in that space.”
As well
as a believer in the practitioners of Internet video, apparently, as
many of the more popular online celebrities will be involved with The
Really Big Internet Show. While Madison Road has yet to line up
a primary advertiser to sponsor the series, the firm believes that—with
some video clips getting two million views a month—having such
“stars” involved will help in the endeavor. “We were
looking at the numbers that some of these Web celebrities produce,”
Jak Severson of Madison Road said. “If you’re an advertiser
looking at those numbers, you can’t ignore two million people
staring at anything."
Of particular
interest is the Internet video celebrity who has been tapped to host
the show: Justine Ezarik, aka iJustine,
of Pittsburgh. iJustine has been producing her own online shorts for
some time now, and was one of five finalists in 2006 for the Yahoo!
Talent Show competition. In August 2007, she filmed “300-Page
iPhone Bill,” a comic take on the initial billing problems the
much-hyped iPhone experienced; the clip was subsequently viewed more
than three million times in ten days, garnering the attention of the
mass media and making iJustine an “instant” Internet star.
Another Pittsburgher, meanwhile—Justin Kownacki—recently
had his webseries, Something
to Be Desired, named a finalist in
the 2008 Yahoo! Video Awards. Forget Hollywood, it’s cities like
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that are the real online hotbeds.
—Anthony
Letizia (May 13, 2008)
