BoomTown » Jane Lynch

A Long Weekend's Journey Into (D7) Flight!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:00:43 +0000

Incredibly, the seventh D: All Things Digital conference begins tomorrow night, after a year of preparation, as we raced to the finish line this past weekend.

Here’s a BoomTown video I did over the weekend of the road trip here, some backstage shots and a staff trip to the movies on the last night we can all actually relax.

It includes: my mother being perplexed by Twitter (which will be fodder for a good question for co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone on opening night of D7 tomorrow); my assistant, Ed, getting threaded; our first D commercial by my friend and also new Fox television star Jane Lynch of “Glee” (incredibly, we realized that she and I now both work for Rupert Murdoch); and a short primer on this year’s show by my terrific partner, Walt Mossberg.

Also, my older brother, Dr. Jeff Swisher, turns into an annoyingly geeky movie reviewer.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Kara Visits Sundance and Interviews Hurley, Hastings and Kilar

Kara Swisher — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:29:06 +0000

Here’s a longish video BoomTown did over the weekend at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, the famous annual independent film gathering now taking place in Park City, Utah.

I was there to moderate a panel on Saturday titled, “Where Do We Go From Here? Icons of the Digital Age.”

It was a great session, with a lot of insights as to where things are headed in the online video space and how that would impact the movie industry. Main conclusion: Significantly.

The trio of panelists were: Chad Hurley, the co-founder and CEO of the Google (GOOG) video service, YouTube; Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, the premium online video service that is a joint venture of News Corp. (NWS) and GE (GE) unit NBC Universal; and Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix (NFLX), the largest online DVD rental service, which has been moving into an ever wider range of distribution of movies on the Web. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

I did interviews with each of them, as well as a chat with my only indie celebrity friend, Jane Lynch, some scenes from the festival and an intro and outro from my own little stars, Louie and Alex Swisher.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Kara Visits Sundance: MySpace, Main Street and Our Very Own Celeb Tour Guide

Kara Swisher — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 18:56:37 +0000

While at the Sundance Film Festival, I took a little tour of Park City, Utah, visiting with Chris DeWolfe and Dani Dudeck of MySpace and Sundance’s digital guru Ian Calderon and trudging up Main Street with my celebrity tour guide, Jane Lynch (who is about as hysterical as you get in “Best in Show” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”).

This is my third year at Sundance, where I moderate tech panels for the independent film festival.

Obviously, issues related to technology are becoming ever larger for the film community and most especially for the independent filmmakers, as they seek to get their material wider distribution than Hollywood’s current chokehold system provides.

The Sundance Film Festival is held annually in Park City and focuses on screenings of new indie films. Still, Sundance has been expanding additional offerings in the digital arena with panels throughout the festival.

The panel I moderated (see video here) was about online video, called “Webolution!–Hollywood Adapts to the Web.”

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]