A writer at NBC's "The Office" has gotten the nod from MetaCafe users as the "fan favorite" among original Web series from the popular video hub. The contest called MetaVote has been running on the site in the last month to help generate sustained interest in web-exclusive programming. The material was supplied by Strike.TV, which brings offline talent to the Web. As we all know after years of many more misses than hits, webisode audiences are tough things to build. I have to admit that even the stuff I have seen that I liked in the first few episodes fell …

In coming years, more and more TV viewers will be doing what I have to do every night when my wife and I contemplate an evening of lean-backness. What's it gonna cost us this time? Do I rent from Apple TV or fire up the Google TV to look for a better deal on Amazon? If no compelling recent issue film seems worth the $4 to $5 a la carte fee, then which back catalog of all-you-can eat wares do I plumb? Amazon Prime's limp but growing library that costs me $70 or so a year (with other benefits)? Netflix …

Most viral video ads have a "do you believe this?" "how did they do that (or "did they really do that?") and "you gotta see this" factor that sparks sharing, regardless of the brand appropriateness of the content. The upside of this convention is massive distribution online. The downside? Hit or miss targeting. Who knows why someone shared the video of that dazzling scene and whether it connects at all with the product? Worse, unfortunately and increasingly, this one-upmanship means an arms race of digitally generated imagery. As ads become entire "Inception"-style worlds of surreal impossibilities I find my old-fogeyism …

If those July 4 hot dogs yesterday just didn't seem to have enough of that true pork flavor, or seemed a little on the trim and low-fat side, then you must have missed the first episode of "Grillin' with Rico" last weekend at TR3S.com, the site from bilingual bicultural Viacom brand Tr3S: MTV, Musica y Mas. The newly launched cooking show hosted by chef Rico Chips featured a special recipe of wrapping those dogs in bacon, just to add that extra bit of flavor and saturated fat.

If TMZ focused on any other category but celebrity gossip, I imagine its leader Harvey Levin would be an even bigger emblem of digital brand building than Arianna Huffington. This is one of the most amazing trajectories I have seen in the perennial (usually elusive) pursuit of digital germination of cross-media success. TMZ has a massively popular Web site, some superb mobile apps, a Sirius radio show, a nightly TV program and daily live video chats hosted by Levin and his cohort Charles. It started only six years ago and arguably is the best instance of a brand built on …

For the Web video phobics who expect streaming media to cannibalize TV viewing and undermine age-old business models, warm up your paranoia. The share of Web video viewers who are watching online media between 6 pm and 9 pm has gone up more than 30 points in the last two years. The Yahoo!/Interpret study of over 4,000 online viewers compared survey results compiled this year with those from 2009.

Apparently at its end, the Perrier Le Club campaign online can claims some level of success if video views are the measure. Earlier in June, Perrier invited users to watch and share a video of a party scene on YouTube. The hook was that the more people who watched and shared, "the hotter the party." To wit, increased viewer levels would unlock new versions of the same clip of a beautiful woman making her way through the party to an ice bucket to pull out a Perrier. I gather they got what they were after.

Raise your hand if you weren't quite sure BRUT still existed as a brand? Maybe it is an aging thing. I vaguely recall coming upon the forest green bottle in drug stores here and there since my youth, but we are long past the days when Joe Namath, Jimmy Connors and Muhammad Ali fronted for the brand. Perhaps I am being unfair but I tend to identify BRUT with long sideburns, oversized gold medallions on hairy chests that were made apparent by the shirt that was open down to the sternum. Now BRUT seems intent on identifying itself with yet …

"This is really addicting," I admit to my wife after more than an hour of my distracting her from reading with a new iPad app called Video Time Machine. From gangster films of the 1930s to Ford commercials of the mid 60s, Wonderama in the early 70s to Chet Huntley explaining to Dick Cavett why he was signing off from the Huntley Brinkley Report, this app is a trove of historically indexed video for the hard and softcore media mavens.

What is real in an age when purported "reality TV" has "finales" and one-named self-branded celebrity wannabes posing as people? When being on a show like "Survivor "or "Jersey Shore" is just another path to celebrity in which every move is self-conscious and calculated to achieve effect? You want real? Try enduring the clip below - the emotional climax to the 1973 PBS series "An American Family."