Getting the 411…
People now upload an astonishing 13 hours of video to Youtube evey minute.
Every minute.
This is an astonishing number.
For an established production company, an order of 13 one-hour shows is a season of work.
13 hours every minute is just breathtaking. And it speaks volumes about the rise of video as an everyday medium.
This is an enormously powerful machine for content to be tapped into.
What is lacking at Youtube, of course, is focus.
In the TV industry, the term ‘youtube’ is shorthand for messy, hard to watch, Blair Witch-like home video. Not to mention the issues of releases, music rights or rights in general.
In short, it’s a mess. But it does scream potential.
The question is, how do you tap into the enormous energy that Youtube evinces without all the baggage of bad focus, bad stories, self-indulgent crap, not to mention lawsuits?
For the past two years, we have been running a very interesting project in partnership with The Travel Channel. It’s called The Travel Channel Academy.
In NY, DC and Santa Barbara (as well as other bespoke locations like Vail, Colorado last week), we train groups of up to 40 aspiring ‘travel journalists’ on how to shoot, cut, upload, story-tell, not to mention get releases and pay attnention to things like music rights. Producers from The Travel Channel also attend the courses, both as students and a speakers, so that they can inform the aspirants as to exactly what the Channel is looking for.
Two years in, we can say it works.
We’ve trained more than 1200 TJs, – Travel Journalists, who are now feeding the channel, its website and its growing demand for phone-based video, tied to GPS. It’s a global, honed and trained machine.
The graduates get paid by the channel for the work that the channel buys and the students get a step up into the very competitive world of video production.
The Channel could never ‘feed the beast’, in the volumes that the new digital world demands, by hiring crews. Far too expensive.
And the grads are a good distance now from Youtube quality. You’ve seen their work.
The demand for the course keeps growing…. and so does the quality of the output.
A few of the grads have even been hired by the Channel for full-time jobs, where the job is travelling the world doing nothing but producing video for the Channel.
Not bad.
Not bad at all.
3 Comments
$ March 17, 2009
You decry a lack of focus on youtube yet isn’t that exactly what makes youtube so poplular?
Having more focus would mean, to me, less inclusive.
I still have a hard time with your analogies.
Comparing youtube uploads to content on multiple, one hour shows from a production company.
It seems silly.
No different than comparing how many times people send an e-mail to the number of novels published.
Apples and oranges.
MIchael Castleman March 16, 2009
Its great to see a dedication to increasing the levels of production on YouTube, travel can be such a great topic open to so much interpretation.
I have been producing website videos for years at http://www.website-video.com.au/, and have always loved travel videos.
I just hope the course focused also on the content, not just shooting skills.
Avery March 16, 2009
13 hours of video a minute, that is amazing.
It looks like to me all Youtube will ever be is just a video hosting site. Lots of smart people are trying to figure out how to make money in proportion to the hours of video coming in. They haven’t got it figured out yet and who knows if they ever will.
Thats great Travel Channel has 1200 folks out filming for them but I wonder if its sustainable.
I have been trained at one of the TC Academies and I have even been paid for a piece that has aired on the Travel Channel.
The flaw in the slaw, as I see it, seems to be the low pay and the cumbersome and apparently even random way submittals are chosen.
Maybe the plan is to keep training people and skim the cream off the top before the newly trained figure out it aint going to happen for them.
Don’t get me wrong, what I learned at the academy has been a big benefit for starting my own production company. I just don’t see how this model will sustain its self.
Avery