Chris Brogan and the Future of Internet TV
Thus when he makes a comment like, “I think television is about to explode in a whole different way; I think it’s going to get vast on the Internet, and then what will happen is quality will continue to matter and there’ll be small grafts of good programming,” it carries some credence.
This is different than what you find on YouTube, mind you, as he is referring to what amounts to a literal television show. There are already examples scattered across the Internet landscape; some combine the comedic with social commentary, such as Rocketboom and The Show with ZeFrank, while others are episodic serials, like The Guild and Something to Be Desired. And it doesn’t stop there.
“David Lynch on Talk of the Nation said that he would never do another TV show,” Brogan said, “but he would consider making TV for the Internet because it’s just a better distribution platform for him and he can do so much more with it.”
Of course experts in the field have been making such proclamations for over ten years now, predicting how the Internet would change the television industry and usher in a new wave of programming ever since webcasting was first introduced in the 1990s. There was even a non-video webseries, The Spot, which was the hot new thing, an Internet-based Melrose Place featuring images, graphics and online diaries by fictional characters. But it fizzled out just like all the promises of that decade. So what makes now different?
“With the advent of ubiquitous broadband and with the downsizing price of technology, from cameras to what it takes to edit, more and more people are able to create good shows,” Chris Brogan commented at PodCamp Pittsburgh 2. “Which means that people who maybe had a barrier to learning how to create decent film now have a fast track to making reasonably quality video.”
Brogan believes that when the mainstream the networks and cable channels realize they can pilot more shows than they currently do now—“It costs a million-two per episode for most average TV shows today on mainstream television versus a couple thousand per episode in the Web world”—their mentalities will change.
“I can take that same million and distribute it across two hundred producers and I wouldn’t lose as much money, because if I got five of those to be really good it’s still less money than trying to bank on every single show,” he explained. “Television exists to make money though advertising, and what’s going to happen is they’re not going to go after one big nut anymore, they’re going to go after little grafts that collect a lot of people together.”
Chris Brogan even offered an example. “Something to Be Desired is a great show for Pittsburgh. It’s also a great show for urban young people,” he said of the Justin Kownacki webseries creation. “Urban young people might not be the best market share when you need X millions of people, but if you turn it the other way and say, ‘I’ve got a show that relates directly to urban young people talking about their relationships,’ and you look at all the products that we have that match that, suddenly you can really segregate your market place much tighter and much more controlled. And all of a sudden those ads we always skip through when we’re watching regular mainstream TV are important to me. I’m engaging with them and saying, ‘Oh, this is something I do want to buy; I didn’t know it was out there.’ It makes it a lot easier to do that.”
Not only will this change the landscape of what we call “television,” but will also affect those already making Internet television as well. He pointed out how the popularity of YouTube, for instance, has altered the entertainment industry. “Stand-up comics who realized YouTube was a better distribution model than going to clubs suddenly are going up against Will Ferrell, who came out of Saturday Night Live to start shooting his own little video projects on the side,” Brogan remarked. “And he’s getting twenty million views as opposed to a friend who gets a thousand. Now the friend who had ten thousand is now down to a thousand because he’s competing against Will Ferrell. So as the mainstream products that are more known and have bigger distribution and have millions of viewers start going onto the Internet, it requires the people who are making quality Internet TV to get better. The challenge they are going to face is to begin making much more tighter, better quality video. The ‘gee-whiz’ factor has to go away a lot faster and people are going to have to create something that’s compelling for more than the novelty factor of it being on the Internet.”
How then will this new era work? After all, since the advent of iTunes offering television shows, all the networks have begun making episodes available for free on the Internet. What additional changes can the independent video producer expect, and how precisely will it all mesh together?
“You will be paying more attention to the fact that FOX is a production platform, that NBC is a production platform,” Brogan answered. “And while your show is independently produced it will work along side some of their platforms as well. Because what they are really going to want is the mindshare, so it’s going to open up in a lot of ways. That’s where I think it goes.”
There are examples of this future on the Internet already, with websites like blip.tv, Next New Networks and Network2. Although similar in that they all offer Internet television shows, they differ in their approach and business models. Blip.tv, for instance, is a hosting company that gathers quality video products and makes them readily available on one website, similar to a television network.
Next New Networks, on the other hand, not only collects quality shows for viewing, but is involved in the editing and venting of content, the distinction being similar to how HBO (blip.tv) is different than HBO Pictures (Next New Networks).
Network2 is a third model, and acts like a TV-Guide-for-the-Internet in that it collects webseries of interest and then points viewers to the actual sites of these shows. It’s a form of a meta-aggregator, a web application that can go even further and allow the viewer to match their personal interests with specific shows that match those interests. It then mixes these interest-specific shows into a personalized “channel,” a concept Brogan believes will be important over the next few years.
“Suddenly it becomes Chris TV, it’s Andrew TV, it’s Anybody TV,” he commented. “I don’t need to watch golf. It’s OK, I understand it’s out there and people do it, but it doesn’t entertain me. I don’t like medical dramas. So I can start plucking things that are of interest to me. I can watch technology shows, I can watch funny shows, and I can start building the shows around me. I’m the cable box.”
Chris Brogan does indeed know something about video on the Internet, and he not only has the resume to prove it, but the informed vision of its future to go along with it.
Anthony Letizia (September 10, 2007)
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