About

Tomo News (Chinese: 蘋果動新聞), previously known as Next Media Animation, NMA News and Taiwanese Animators, is a website^[1] and YouTube^[2] channel that produces a series of short CGI animated videos created for various news outlets in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Most of the videos are only of local interest, but some cover a wide variety of world events that are often depicted in an exaggerated fantastical manner, and are posted to the International YouTube channel.

History

NMA News was started by Jimmy Lai, Chariman and Founder of the Hong Kong based media company Next Media. In 2007, Lai was determined to expand his company's coverage of news events by creating short animated videos. This kind of CGI would normally take a few days to produce, but Lai wanted a very rapid turnaround time. He spent a large sum of money to develop the resources in Next Media Animation to allow them to churn out videos in 2 hours, including the use of motion capture technology. As of August 2011, they produce about 30 such videos a day for the Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, and selected episodes are published to YouTube to reach international audiences.

NMA Employee Resignation Video

On September 28th, 2013, NMA producer Marina Shifrin uploaded a video titled "An Interpretive Dance For My Boss Set To Kanye West's Gone" in which she publicly announces her resignation while dancing to Kanye West's "Gone." In the video, which was shot at around 4:30 a.m. in the office, Shifrin reveals her dissastifaction with page views taking priority before the quality of editorial content.

I work for an awesome company that makes news videos. I have put my entire life into this job, but my boss only cares about quantity, how fast we write and how many views each video gets. I believe it's more important to focus on the quality of the content. When you learn to improve this, the views will come. Here is a little video I made explaining my feelings.

In the following 48 hours, the YouTube video garnered more than 620,000 views and mentions from dozens of internet news sites, including TIME^[10], NBC^[9], The Telegraph^[14], Gawker^[12] and WebProNews^[11] among many others.

Reception

The animation series first gained noteriety in late November of 2009, when Tiger Woods was involved in an SUV accident linked to his alleged affair. Lai recognized the popularity of Woods, and the 260-member team quickly produced an episode about the incident the same day.

The video featured over-the-top scenarios including a scene with Woods' wife, Elin Nordegren, chasing after the SUV with a golf club. The video has received over 2.7 million views as of August 15th, 2011.

NMA's international video channel receives about 4.1 million hits a day, and the company makes about $210 million in revenue, expanding to produce animations for BBC, Cartoon Network, and other companies.^[3][4]

Traffic

NMA.tv has a global rank of 134,842 and US rank of 64,113 on Alexa^[7], and a Compete^[8] rank of 203,212.

Notable Videos

Events

Internet Culture

External References