Now It’s All iPhone All The Time

Dublin Dockers by Philip Bromwell, RTE/Ireland

There is no question that the iPhone is a real game-changer for video – and apparently for television.

We have done an increasing number of video trainings with iPhones only – most recently for the new London Live
24-hour local news channel in London.  For that one, we trained newspaper reporters from The Independent and
The London Evening Standard to shoot videos for the channel.

We have also trained United Nations field operatives to shoot their own stories (and edit them) on iPhones.

The reason for this is simple:

If you are going to go out into the field and shoot a video, you have to take a video camera with you.
That’s a lot to drag around. A lot of gear to take.
It is often an impediment – no matter how small the cameras have become.

But everyone carries an iPhone with them all the time.
In fact, there are now more than 1.8 billion smart phones (I used iPhone as a generic term) around the world.

That’s 1.8 billion video cameras AND edit decks in 1.8 billion hands.
That is A LOT of camera ‘crews’.

If you give these people the right training (Philip Bromwell was a graduate of one of our BBC video bootcamps), and if they have
the right motivation – and they are in interesting places – well, you have pretty much changed the basic architecture of video
and television newsgathering.

A lot of people, particularly in the industry, have tended to downplay and degrade the concept of iPhone video reporting.

“In a pinch…”  “good for a few things”… stuff like that.

Take good look at Philip Bromwell’s video.

You are looking at the future.

Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2014