The last music video I can recall from the Beach Boys was for their comeback hit Kokomo in the late 80s, which included only a partial crew that had no Brian Wilson and included a conga-playing John Stamos. A better version was made for the Muppet Beach Party album, with Kermit the Frog singing lead. The closest thing I can recall to an effective Beach Boys video was their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1968 when the band's Good Vibrations performance was superimposed on kaleidoscopic views of the band walking about. It was vintage 1960s TV struggling to …

We're not sure how many times both of the Web's largest and perennially struggling portals can claim to be getting behind video...again. But much like AOL, Yahoo continues to insist it is devoted to the format. Variety's Andrew Wallenstein reports this morning that Yahoo is back in the business of creating TV-like series programming for the Web.

Holy Jigowatts, Marty. Doc Brown has time traveled once again and landed in 2011. This is the kind of pop-cult viral concept we would love to see more of in the U.S. Argentinian electronics store chain Garbarino licensed the "Back to the Future" franchise from Universal and Amblin Entertainment, and even recruited the original Doc Brown, Christopher Lloyd, for a new series of viral videos.

We bargain over film going and video viewing in my house. My wife is philosophically opposed to sad endings and somber existential narrative. She walked out of the living room in the middle of "Barney's Version" because she found it too depressing to bear. I, of course, was the teenager sneaking into Manhattan to hit an uptown art house in the mid-1970s to catch Lina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties of Fellini's Amarcord." "Why not just grab a knife from the kitchen and open a vein, for God's sake," she complains. "Why would I want to deliberately depress myself that way?"

Yesterday we reviewed a film that was financed entirely with integrated advertising, Morgan Spurlock's "Greatest Movie Ever Sold." Today we turn to a project that could use a few good sponsors to see the light of day. Or to see the dark of an art house cinema. The makers of the proposed film about comic strip artists and the decline of their platform, newspapers, are in need of final financing. "Stripped" is not a "Food Inc" expose or "Waiting for Superman" polemic. It describes itself benignly as a "love letter to the art form" of comics.

Apple's iTunes has become a powerful mainstay for digital downloads of film and TV in the last few years, but it will have to work some special magic to help documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock hit his benchmarks for "POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." If the documentary funded by product placement about product placement ever hit theaters in the U.S. it was too quickly for me to catch. The download showed up on iTunes for sale a few weeks ago and for rental this week. According to Spurlock himself in the film and associated interviews, the movie must …

Tablets and music players aren't the only markets Apple is dominating in the digital world. According to the latest market analysis of movie electronic sell-through (EST) and Internet video on demand (iVOD) services, IHS Screen Digest says that Apple iTunes is effectively fighting off competitors. The owner operator of the iTunes multimedia store saw its share of the market rise to 65.8% in the first half of 2011, up from 64.9% for the same period last year. IHS notes that Apple experienceD a dip in share last year as rivals like Amazon and Wal-Mart's Vudu service joined the Xbox-driven Microsoft …

Any parent of small children knows the sinking feeling that comes when their kid gets the dreaded present with a thousand pieces. These usually come via your single sister or brother (the beloved, hyper-generous aunt or uncle) who is exacting some kind of puckish revenge on the parental sibling. "Oh, how nice, Janey, Aunt Sue got you the play grocery store with 5,000 plastic blueberries," you "celebrate" while shooting eye-daggers at your sister. "Thanks, sis. You gonna come over here and find those damn berries when they end up strewn across the living room," you ask Aunt Sue later.

This mobile video space is not for the feint-hearted. Apparently, streaming media apps are sort of a love-hate thing with many users. Leading video hub Break Media released some interesting stats touting its success with its iOS and Android apps. According to the company 1.5 million people have downloaded the Break Media mobile app, which launched over a year and half ago. Raw download numbers generally are uneven proxies for actual use, but Break says its mobile apps generate 10 million monthly visits or about 100,000 unique visits a day. In total, the mobile traffic constitutes about 12% of all …

We're not entirely sure what to make of Sir Richard Branson's life from the 22-minute synopsis that is the premiere episode of Hulu's "A Day in the Life." The head of Virgin Airways spends much of the 24 hours on planes, doing press interviews, and showing us what a decent, smiley, giggly guy he is.