How To Start Your Own Production Company

First, lose the film!

Yesterday I got an email from an old friend in Colorado who is a professional television cameraman.

He works in news and is one of the best in the business.

But he also sees what is happening to the TV news business – it is not what it once was, and it is never going back there again.

There are a long string of reasons for this, but much of it has to do with what happens when a corporate mentality meets fast new technological change.

Terror.

He has written to me asking about going on his own and starting his own production company.

Bravo!

The time has never been better for this.

In my own personal career, I have followed the path of changing technologies and their impact on the media business.

When I started working in TV in the early 1980s, the only place you could work in video was to get a job with a TV networks. They were the only ones who could afford the cameras, the edits – not to mention the cost and expense of pushing that content through the air as radio waves (crazy in retrospect) to put into people’s homes.

My mentor in this business, Fred Friendly, the former President of CBS News told me that this was the best job in the world. And at the time, it probably was.  I was producing for Charles Kuralt on Sunday Morning on CBS and traveling all over the world making little films.

The first great technological shift was the arrival of cable.  Suddenly, we went from 3 networks to more than 500 cable channels, each in need of content.  This vast new market presented vast new opportunities for those who could ‘feed the beast’ (who suddenly had a much bigger appetite).  To meet this response I founded VNI, whch I sold to The New York Times to become the President of New York Times TV – a massive independent producer of programming for cable.  We produced thousands of hours of content for Discovery, TLC, National Geographic, Showtime and so on – and at a cost below what the networks could produce.

The arrival of video online, on iPhones and on tablets represents yet another massive explosion in demand for video.

But this time, the client is not the broadcaster or the cable channel.

It is, instead, every business that has a website or a web presenence or is contemplating one.

In order to survive, every business must move to the web

And to be on the web today, and increasingly in the future, means that every business must have video.

iPhones, tablets, computers  and whatever else comes along as platforms for the Internet are going to be on screens.

And screens demand video.

Websites that don’t have video 5 years from now are going to look at primitive as green or amber text screens now do to us.

this was once cutting edge

All of these companies, from airlines to real estate agencies to supermarkets are going to need vast amounts of video, and they don’t have the vaguest idea as to how to produce it.

But you do.

The irony is that video production was such a closed society – a guild, for so many years that the number of people who can do this really welll is miniscule in comparison to the demand that is coming.

So by all means. launch your production company

But don’t waste your time on conventional broadcasters.

That’s a tough row to hoe. (I will talk more about this soon)

But right now, the low-hanging fruit is everyone else.