My Life on B-roll.net

Television professionals… and then again….a  few others…

About 7 years ago, I got an email from a professional cameraman who identified himself as ‘Ivan’

He asked if it was true that I was training producers and journalists to shoot and cut their own stories without professional camera crews.

I said it was, and he invited me to visit a site called b-roll.net.

I have been going there ever since.

My relationship with them has been rocky at times. It is understandable. As the digital revolution came (or continues to come) to television news, many of their jobs are imperiled, or at least subject to change.

The site attracts, for the most part, real professional cameramen and women who take their craft very seriously.  They would not be there otherwise. And they have many years of experience and a great deal of technical knowledge to share. Of course, like any site, it does attract its share of nuts and wanna-be’s, but they are thankfully few – though sometimes vocal.

(You can separate the professionals from the wanna be’s, as the professionals now list their real names and have links to their work. You can see just how good they are for yourself).

On Friday, I was surprised to see that one of the topics listed was an open question directed to me, personally.

“Michael, what have you learned?”

It was posted by one of the serious professionals, (who I met in person), so I took the time to craft a serious answer.  Writing the response gave me a moment to think about how my understanding of the entire industry has shifted since the first days at places like TVBergen or TeleZuri, or even Current TV.

The explosion of demand for video – on more than 1,000 cable channels, on the web, and now on phones and soon on iPads means that while there is an almost endless need for new video content, the price that people can pay for it, as the advertising market is fractionalized is ever lower.

It’s an interest  market shift – massively greater demand, increasingly lower price.

It’s the kind of shift in a market that opens enormous opportunities if you are in the right place with the right product.

But here is the lesson I have learned:

No matter how much you cut the cost of production (and cost cutting an absolute necessity today), if the product is not perfect, no one will watch.

Even though there are now more than a thousand cable channels that have to be filled with content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and even if the vast majority of them don’t have a lot of money to pay for content – the content must be perfect, or no one will watch.

Viewers don’t care how cheaply something was made. They don’t make allowances that say, ‘OK, I know that this is a crap cable channel with no money so I can tolerate bad video or bad writing or bad storytelling.’

We have, for the past 40 years, spent on average 4-5 hours a day, every day, watching TV or films.  We have a level of expectation that everything we see is going to be of a certain quality, or we won’t watch it.  We cannot internally rationalize that, ‘I understand they don’t have a lot of money’.

So the trick for the future, and for those who will be successful in the future, is to combine low cost production (because this is an absolute must) with very high quality.

Fortunately, the technology is here that allows this.

But it means that those who wish to enter this new world of digital production must be extremely disciplined and the product they produce must be excellent, both editorially and technically.

As we say in the bootcamps, ‘you will live and die by what is on the screen’.

Today, that is truer than ever – certainly truer (or more true) than when we started.

The excitement of seeing a cat in a tree on Youtube will not last.  But quality will.

All of which takes us back to the people at b-roll.net (or most of them).

They care about quality.

And so there is a lot to be learned from them.