Ask A Ninja‘s Kent Nichols is working on casting his upcoming movie, a remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and he’s looking for victims!

If you’re interested in getting killed off on film by a bunch of tomatoes, visit the Real Red Manace YouTube site and submit a video of yourself being killed by a tomato (or tomatoes).

Contest Dates:

• Contest Begins:  7:00pm (Pacific) on July 24, 2008
• Contest Ends:  Midnight (Pacific) on August 24, 2008
• Contest Judging: On or about August 25, 2008.

Professor Michael Wesch’s presentation on the Anthropology of YouTube at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008.

It’s a great presentation, jam-packed with information, but with enough new media references to make it a lot of fun, too.

More info on Professor Wesch at his Kansas State University site on Digital Ethnography.

Celtx is a free multi-platform media pre-production program, designed to help you not just do scriptwriting, but to pre-produce all types of media – film, video, documentary, theater, machinima, comics, advertising, gaming, music video, radio, podcasts and videocasts.

It’s a very deep application, with support for creating scripts, storyboard scenes and sequences, develop characters, breakdown & tag elements, schedule production, and prepare detailed and informative production reports for cast and crew.

There are sample scripts included with the Celtx download to help you get started. For example, you can browse the scripts and storyboards for The Wizard Of Oz.

To help you get started, Celtx has created a series of feature walkthroughs.

The program is available for Mac, Windows and Linux and in over 20 languages.

via celtx

28 percent of Europeans now regularly watch online video, more than double the rate in 2006, according to a new report from JupiterResearch. In addition, time spent watching online video has grown by 50 percent in the last 12 months.

Short form video content – typified by YouTube – currently accounts for most of this. Just nine percent of Europeans watch full length videos online. Jupiter predicts, though, that this rate will increase significantly as a result of services like the BBC’s iPlayer.

“Online video has now broken through and is a key activity for European Internet users. Although TV is still the primary place to watch video content, it is vital that broadcasters actively engage users online as well as on TV,” said Nick Thomas, European Media Analyst and lead author on the report. “As viewers spend longer watching video online, broadcasters must ensure that the content viewers want to see is available online via legitimate sites, or risk losing audience to pirate sites.”

If you’re a European reader – how are you using online video? Are you watching mainly short videos? Is it replacing some of your television time?

Image: wednesday181

Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer today is challenging Apple to move Apple TV from being a “hobby” to being a real business:

If Steve Jobs wants to make a serious run at owning our living room’s “digital hub,” then Apple TV needs a serious overhaul, ASAP.

Why now? Because even though the industry is still nascent, the Internet-connected living room is becoming more of a realistic proposition. And the market is quickly getting more crowded.

Frommer hits the nail on the head. What makes Internet TV interesting is that you and I and anyone else can publish videos on the Internet for anyone to watch. An Internet TV solution needs to bring that mix of professional and user-generated content to your TV, and make the process a no-brainer.

Apple is half way there with Apple TV. It does a great job of letting you watch your personal videos, YouTube videos and video podcasts.

It falls short in a lot of areas, though:

• For movies rentals, it lags about 89,000 movies behind Netflix;
• It needs to cut deals with Hulu and others to bring long-tail network & studio content to the device; and
• It needs to add a web browser to allow for Web streaming content.

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg let us know about a new development in the WordPress 2.6/PodPress meltdown.

“Two WordPress developers have volunteered fixes for both the 8.8 and 8.9 branches of PodPress,” says Mullenweg. “It’s only a few lines of code to cure the problem.”

The unofficial fixes are available at developer Andrew Ozz’s blog, and they look like they would be straightforward to apply.

Foxinni’s WordPress Videos Theme is designed to make creating a video blog a no-brainer.

The theme is makes it easy to embed your own videos and videos from YouTube, Meta Cafe, MySpace, Veoh and other video platforms.

Features:

• Multiple Color Schemes
• Dark or Light Layouts
• Built-in Recent Videos Widget
• Embed personally hosted videos (.flv)
• Embed from supported videos sites:

YouTube

Meta Cafe

Daily Motion

Vimeo

Veoh

Break.com

Blip

MySpace

Live Leak

Hulu

• Video RSS Support
• Add multiple Videos from different sources to a post.

More information. Theme demo.

Flixwagon has announced that it has an alpha version of a new iPhone live streaming applications available for testing on “jailbroken” iPhones.

Features:

• Express Sign-up on the fly: simply enter your phone number and you’ll be instantly logged-in. You’ll also receive a text message with your new user name and password (which you can change when you log in.
• Edit video details on the fly: change title and tags directly from the device before or during broadcast. This is useful in helping more users discover your broadcast while you’re still live, by adding relevant tags and titles based on events in the broadcast.
• Set sharing preferences directly from the device: set “flix” as private, public, or viewable only by certain groups like friends, family, co-workers, etc.
• Edit video details and sharing preferences on the fly: Choose video quality settings: select between higher resolution (sharper details within the frame) or higher frame rate per second (smoother video flow).

Note: the iPhone apps (1.1.4 and 2.0) are both in Alpha and are primarily for testing streaming from the iPhone platform. Flixwagon hopes to develop an app for the iTunes App Store once the iPhone SDK supports native video.

In other words – this is bleeding edge stuff. Let’s hope that Apple will support this type of development, and turn the iPhone into a multimedia content publishing platform.

The Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) has announced the release of its first ad unit standards and audience measurement guidelines for industry compliance, The Download Measurement Guidelines and Advertising Unit Standards.

The goal of the standards is to make it easier for media buyers to run advertisements across hundreds of podcasts. The guidelines have been accepted by the ADM Ad Council, a fourteen-member interactive advertising agency liaison group, which acts as a sounding board for the ADM committees.

The Advertising Unit Standards include three kinds of formats:

• Insertions
• Content Participation
• Collateral

The units outlined in the document (pdf) are the most common set of existing formats in use today by sponsors and content producers.

The ADM has, in essence, documented current practices. The challenge the organization faces now is to turn this from a document into a recognized and accepted standard.

Details on the announcement below:

Google’s YouTube troubles just got kicked up a notch.

Italian media company Mediaset SpA is suing YouTube and its owner, Google, for at least 500 million euros ($779 million).

Mediaset claims that Google and YouTube carried out the “illegal distribution and commercial use of audio and video files,” according to a Bloomberg report:

According to a sample analysis run by Mediaset on June 10, at least 4,643 videos belonging to the company were found on YouTube. That equals more than 325 hours of broadcasting without corresponding rights, the company said.

Mediaset claims that, based on the number of its clips available on YouTube and the hits generated, the broadcaster lost the equivalent of 315,672 broadcasting days.

The claim of 500 million euros corresponds to “immediate damages,” Mediaset said in the statement.

Google already has a billion-dollar Viacom lawsuit on its plate.

Given YouTube’s size and popularity, its massive library of user-submitted videos, and Google’s deep pockets, the YouTube legal battles are probably just getting started.