TechCrunch
Netflix Scores Its First Emmy With House Of Cards Directing Win
Netflix has won its first Emmy after House of Cards director David Fincher won the award for Best Director of a Drama Series, beating out directors from Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey and Homeland.
Its Emmy win marks an important milestone for Netflix as it moves beyond rerunning TV shows and films on its streaming video platform to creating original content. House of Cards, which launched in January, reaped 9 of Netflix’s 14 Primetime Emmy nominations. The others were three nominations for Arrested Development and two for Hemlock Grove.
As Ryan Lawler noted in July when the nominations were first announced, Netflix’s Emmy nods come just two years after the company first announced its plans to get into original programming with House of Cards, and little over a year after its first original series, Lillyhammer, premiered.
Today’s Emmy win is a strong indicator that Netflix can compete with television’s major players, even though it redefines “primetime” by presenting shows in much different ways than traditional networks. Netflix does not have linear programming and all episodes in a season are made available at once.
The positive critical reception Netflix has received for its original series, including House of Cards, Arrested Development, Hemlock Grove and Orange Is The New Black, calls back to the way HBO and other cable networks changed the TV landscape in the early 1990s. Before then, cable networks were known mostly for syndicating TV shows and running second-rate movies. Then HBO began releasing original content, including The Larry Sanders Show, that did well with both viewers and critics.
For many TV critics, the premiere of The Sopranos on HBO in 1999 heralded a new “Golden Age of Television,” with cable networks launching series, such as Breaking Bad, The Wire and Mad Men, that are more narratively complex and darker in tone than previous well-received TV dramas. With other streaming services like Amazon Studios and Hulu following Netflix’s lead by coming out with their own original programming, the next Golden Age of TV may happen on streaming video instead.
VivaKi Partners With SparkReel To Help Marketers Manage Crowdsourced Videos
As the amount of user-generated video continues to grow, a startup called SparkReel aims to help companies harness those videos for their own promotional efforts. Now the startup should get a big boost thanks to a new partnership with VivaKi, the digital innovation arm of advertising giant Publicis.
VivaKi is making the deal through its ventures group, which is headed by Michael Wiley. Despite the name, Wiley said his group doesn’t normally invest cash for equity – instead, it connects startups with the parts of Publicis where their technology and services might be useful, and it also works with startups to develop new products and features that might specifically address client needs. (Wiley said VivaKi has started to make traditional equity investments too, but that’s a separate process.)
So why work with SparkReel? Wiley said VivaKi is focused on four major “pillars” — mobile, social, “next generation storytelling,” and data/analytics. With tools that allow marketers to collect fan videos directly and also to aggregate them from social platforms like Instagram, Vine, and YouTube, SparkReel occupies “three of the pillars for sure, if not all four,” he said. (Since the videos can be posted from desktop or mobile, and since SparkReel also offers analytics showing where videos are posted and what people are saying about them, I think it’d be fair for the startup to claim all four.)
To illustrate what SparkReel can do, co-founder Matt Gibbs sent me a few of examples via email. He said Men’s Fitness Magazine used SparkReel to power its fitness challenge, with 400 posted videos posted driving 80,000 views. Verizon Fios, meanwhile, held a contest tied to Iron Man 3, where fans could share their “superhuman” moves for a chance to win tickets to the red carpet premiere. And Keystone Mountain used SparkReel for a Facebook community where guests at Keystone’s terrain park Area 51 could share their “top shreds.”
“Brands aren’t the only ones excited about simplified video sharing,” Gibbs added. “SparkReel also helps turn wedding guests into a team of crowdsourced videographers.” (I’m guessing that part may be little less interesting to VivaKi, though hey, maybe I’m wrong.)
Including SparkReel, there are now a total of nine companies in VivaKi’s ventures program: Chute, CrowdTwist, Flite, Jana, Mass Relevance, Nativo, SeeMore Interactive, and Voxsup.
No comments:
Post a Comment