Posted by Steve Woolf

Judging by the number of inquiries we get every day asking about EPIC FU from our truly amazing viewers, a lot of you have noticed that we haven't posted a new episode of the show since late March. We'll be back in about a week, but the hiatus we've taken has allowed us to refuel the creative gas tanks and think about the future of the show.

As we come up on the two-year anniversary for EPIC FU in early June, we can't help but think about how much the show has changed over the years. The early JETSET episodes were constituted as a variety and sketch show. We spent those first nine months identifying our viewers and transitioning into the format that became a resource and hangout for so many more people than we could have expected.

In March of 2007 we entered a licensing partnership with Next New Networks, and in the past year EPIC FU has come into its own. We benefitted from the advertising relationships they created and from their super-distribution strategy, which helped us bring in audiences at video hosting sites across the web. We were always on the same page about the importance of creativity, community, and interactivity as core elements of everything related to the show.

We spent a lot of time talking with Tim Shey, Fred Seibert, Jed Simmons, Herb Scannell, and their very talented team. The amount of knowledge they were willing to share with us about building brands and developing business strategies helped expand our thinking and made us examine what we are creating in ways we had not considered previously. We are fortunate to have people like them as mentors and friends.

After much consideration and discussion with NNN, we've decided to go our separate ways. As Tim wrote on the NNN company blog, it's no secret that we're good friends and really enjoyed our time working together. You know a partnership has been a success if each side comes out stronger for it. With NNN racking up something like 30 million video views a month across their networks these days, we fully expect them to continue to be viewed as leaders in our young industry.

The next stage for each of us is more focused than it has ever been. With so many strong brands and entertaining shows, NNN has something for everyone. And EPIC FU will be back soon with new shows, great guests, and plenty of Zadi snaps. :)

Posted by Steve Woolf

We're really proud to be able to say that EPIC-FU is nominated for a 2008 Webby Award in the Variety category of Film & Video! It's really exciting because we won the People's Voice Webby Award in 2007 for JETSET, which would eventually evolve into EPIC-FU.

Zadi, Rick, and I have all worked very hard to make a show that strives to be consistently creative and entertaining, as well as a resource of information and a tastemaker for our audience. We have some very tough competition this year, including our friend Alex Albrecht's show The Totally Rad Show, along with Tom Green, The NY Times, and our friends at Good Magazine.

If you watch the show and you like EPIC-FU, please take a couple of minutes to vote for us for the People's Voice award. If you're registered and logged in, you can click this link to go directly to the form. Otherwise you can find us by going to pv.webbyawards.com and going to Film & Video and voting in the Variety category. Thanks!

And a special thanks to Rick Rey, our erstwhile associate producer who gets very little of the credit for his work on the show, but has a lot to do with its content and creativity. Rock on, Rick!

Posted by Steve Woolf

A couple of weeks ago an EPIC-FU episode was featured on the home page of YouTube thanks to the generous selection of their editors. We expected to get a nice amount of views, but we never expected the episode to move past 3 million views when all was said and done. In fact, the episode is still compiling about 10-20,000 views per day as of the time of this writing.

We're obviously very happy that the show is resonating with the largest community of web video aficionados on the Internet. It's gives us a great sense of validation to know that we created a weekly show that can generate those kinds of numbers. Not easy to do these days.

What was especially interesting to us was to watch this video run away from all the other videos that were featured on YouTube at the same time as us. No other video crossed the million mark during the week we were featured. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about why that happened to try and understand the dynamics that affect viewership on popular video hosting sites.

For one thing, we've been producing regular content for a year and a half with JETSET and now EPIC-FU. So to some extent we can call the built-in audience a factor in the video's explosive views. But we didn't have a significantly greater number of YouTube subscribers than many other shows that have been featured and did not experience such a high number of views.

Another possible factor is that we always place a frame strategically in the exact middle of the upload so that when YouTube generates its preview thumbnail, prospective viewers are given a sense of the tone and personality of the show when reviewing the myriad choices for them to watch. However this image is quite small, and some videos that typically experience large view numbers have scantily clad women or mainstream celebrities as their preview image. Our preview image of this video is shown at left.

Then there's the title of the video: taking no sh1t, internet love song, writer's guild. A very typical title for us since we cover so much ground in each episode. It's somewhat provocative, but is definitely less so than many other videos.

Finally we come to the content of the video. We touched on a number of politically charged stories that engendered a great deal of discussion in the comments under the video. In particular we said some things about the Writer's Guild of America strike that is currently taking place. These statements seemed to provoke a really strong reaction from many viewers on both sides of the issue. Given the timing of the strike and the topical nature of the commentary in our video, this seems to be a strong factor in people watching the video and then passing it along to their friends to see, which is the really important factor in generating huge view numbers.

So without getting more scientific about it, it seems like we had a combination of factors that led to the breakout number of views. Good title, solid preview image, passionate existing fanbase, and provocative content. This is the kind of formula we strive to have in every show so that when the opportunity comes along to be promoted on a place like the YouTube home page, we are able to take maximum advantage of that exposure.

Are there any other major factors that I've missed? Why do you think this video has 4X the number of views of any other EPIC-FU video on YouTube?

Posted by Steve Woolf

In yesterday's Techcrunch article about Miro's new media player Zadi made a quick cameo. Ha.

The good people at Miro have worked really hard to develop their completely open source media player, and they are positioning themselves to take on Joost. They've created a great product, and we're fortunate that EPIC-FU (and JETSET earlier) have been default subscriptions for new installations for a long time. Thanks guys, and congrats on the new player!

Posted by Steve Woolf

Our friend Sunny Gault and her team from Viral caught up with Zadi at the Streaming Media West conference this past week. They sat down and talked about how the show evolved from "Jet Set Show" to EPIC-FU.

You can check out more videos from Viral on their network channel on Veoh, or on their blog site. Thanks, Sunny and team!

Posted by Steve Woolf

As some of you may know already, earlier today we launched a new website and rebranded our relatively successful web show JETSET into EPIC-FU. So far the response has been very strong in support of the new name and feel. There is also criticism and confusion, which is understandable. Name changes are a big deal and people get comfortable with things.

In the run-up to the name change, the one thing we did not have time to properly consider was a communications plans to make our motivations clear. After all, there's really only the three of us doing all the production work, editing, and website design and development for JETSET and other projects. We've had some great support from Next New Networks helping us with the show's myriad distribution points. But the thought behind the name change needs to come directly from the show creators, myself and Zadi. We couldn't ask our partners to explain our decisions for us.

JETSET began as "The Jet Set Show" in June 2006. At that time the show was for a much younger audience, and the name was chosen specifically to sound friendly and snappy. Over the months we found that our sensibilities were suited for an older audience and we shifted the show's creative direction to suit. Things move awfully fast on the web. By September 2006 we were building an audience of teens. By December 2006 we were building an audience of college-aged people. The Jet Set Show had become JETSET -- we were looking for ways to make the surrounding look and feel grow up with our audience.

The past few weeks JETSET has seen phenomenal growth. In September we had over a million total views for the show. In October we did a million views for a single week. So, you might ask, what's the problem?

Intellectual property is the problem. We have big, big plans for the show, and the term "jet set" is everywhere.

Creatively we also had a strong concern that the name JETSET no longer served any descriptive purpose in defining the show. To borrow a phrase from the great Rodney Dangerfield, if I had a nickel for every time we were asked if JETSET was a travel show, I'd have a shitload of nickels.

We always described our show as the new pop culture. What we meant by that was the strictest definition of the new POPULAR culture. Fred Seibert summed it up perfectly when we were in New York -- for most people over 25, MTV defined popular culture through music. For the people growing up now, the Internet is the defining cultural engine. Our show was always about exploring that culture and talking about all the people who were empowered by a new kind of media. That is the new popular culture as we see it. And that is an Epic Fuck You to the establishment in all the best and most meaningful ways.

Logistically a name and brand change is a huge pain in the ass. But the longer you wait the worse it gets. We've waited too long as it is. Even though JETSET has a following in the online video world, it's still in the very infancy of its development. One of our goals as a company is to take our shows across all forms of media, new and old. As we embark on that process, all of us content creators have to make sure we fully own everything we create so that we never have any baggage to lug along when great opportunities come knocking.

With those thoughts in mind we want to get as much feedback as possible about the branding change, so please keep sending us emails, Twitters, Facebook messages, Myspace messages, SMS's, everything!