DECA

Eclectic, popular webzine-turned-blog BoingBoing.net is going video gaga… tv.boingboing.net will bring the group blog’s “directory of wonderful things” to video through 3-5 minute daily reports on weekdays. The reports, sponsored by IBM for the first three months, will be hosted by co-founders Xeni Jardin—aka “platinum blond cyberbabe” per the LAT—and Mark Frauenfelder.

Gina Piccalo of the LA Times is reporting on the launch of a new daily online TV show by Boing Boing which will be located at tv.boingboing.net. Boing Boing TV, produced by DECA in Santa Monica, will feature daily 3-5 minute reports hosted by Boing Boing authors Xeni Jardin and Mark Frauenfelder, with regular segments by Boing Boing’s three other contributors David Pescovitz, Cory Doctorow and Joel Johnson.

Non-traditional studios focused on content for the digital age are popping up left and right. Continuing the trend, a couple of Sony Pictures executives, Michael Wayne and Chris Kimbell, have launched a studio named Deca to identify, develop, finance, market, and distribute interactive entertainment concepts and properties across emerging media platforms.

DECA is a yet-to-launch company that aims to develop, finance, and distribute professional video over the Web. The company announced it has raised $5 million to build its service, which will combine video with social networking to try and launch professional quality entertainment at a fraction of the cost of traditional distribution.

Santa Monica-based digital entertainment studio DECA, has officially launched, while announcing the $5 million venture round from the Mayfield Fund, General Catalyst Partners and Niklas Zennstrom’s Atomico Investments, that was reported earlier this month. In an interview with NewTeeVee, DECA CEO Michael Wayne made clear that the company isn’t just a digital production company, but consider itself an actual studio in the Hollywood sense of the word. As such, the company will discover, invest in and promote promising online video content.

Santa Monica-based DECA is announcing today that it has raised $5M for an online digital entertainment studio. The firm said that the Series A funding came from Mayfield, General Catalyst Partners, and Atomico Investments, the investment firm co-founded by Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom. DECA said that it will actively identify, develop, finance, market, and distribute interactive entertainment for the Internet and other emerging digital technologies and platforms.

Mayfield, General Catalyst Partners, and Atomico Investments have put $5 million into Deca.tv, a newly launched production house for mainstream digital entertainment. Deca was started by Michael Wayne and Chris Kimbell, both from Sony Pictures.

DECA, says Wayne, is a startup out of Los Angeles, and that’s important. It funds online video shows, usually taking a majority equity stake in exchange for setup, infrastructure, and legal services. “I think people in Northern California don’t realize that long before there was venture capital, the Hollywood studio model was venture capital for entertainment.”

In “Brando,” the documentary that starts tonight on Turner Classic Movies, there’s an amazing home video made by Brando and Montgomery Clift.

I couldn’t find it on the Interweb. So I asked TCM if they’d put it on their site … and they did!

If Brando and Clift had had YouTube, this is the video they would have made.

Better than Smosh, or not?

Check it out: the greatest film actors of what some say is ALL TIME are horsing around in drag — naturally — and otherwise hamming it up. They’re also reading cut-up newspapers, playing dress-up in Easter bonnets and sipping espresso. Or pretending to.

That’s what short video was like in them there 1940s. Would BrandoClift have made the day’s Most Viewed? Most Discussed? And what Screener wants to grab it for a recut?

Padilla and Hecox go by the joint nickname Smosh, and they are the Saturday Night Live of YouTube. Their videos are insanely popular. Their genius, if that’s the right word for it, is in their unswerving, unwinking commitment to idiocy. It may also be in their shaggy haircuts. (Smosh is some kind of inside joke that has something to do with some friend of theirs talking about mosh pits … Never mind.)