Video has notoriously dominated the entertainment industry, and thus the advertising industry for a half century. Recently though, the 300 pound gorillas of the video entertainment industry have taken a beating. So many factors have curbed their power, and now we are looking at an emerging opportunity to gather some of that power to ourselves by using the hypnotic mystery of video ourselves in the online venue.
The internet has certainly brought the middlemen of nearly every sector to their knees. If we look at entertainment brokers as middlemen, could we imagine creating our own content, promoting our own productions, and controlling more of our own traffic and advertising potential? Some innovative web developers have taken us halfway there.
YouTube, Guba, Google Video, Blip TV, and many other providers of free video sharing sites have given all of us the power to publically publish our own video content. The productions are rightfully short due to the issue of bandwidth as well as file storage, but there is also the issue of the truncated attention span of the modern day internet surfer. Even with these episode length curtailments, there are still many respectable serials up on these free sharing sites, and they are quite well done. As a matter of fact, there is something to be said for short, powerful punches of entertainment. In effect, serials made up of short streaming episodes can add up to impressive, award winning quality, production results.
We would like to advocate the concept that a new art form is being organically developed as we speak. There does seem to be a further impediment to the serious pursuit of the art by the masses however. This is not to say that there is no pursuit at all, just that what is being done is not really serious. It might be guessed that a factor in the inhibition to the seriousness of the majority of the efforts we see on these video sharing sites is that there is really no incentive for anyone to create gripping, well thought out, well crafted, and well acted content. What we’re talking about is money. There is no compensatory incentive.
This is not to cynically say that the only legitimate motive for quality from the unwashed masses is cash. We simply have to understand that most people need to spend their time on activities that will put food on the table, not on self expressive, artsy whims of fancy. Some may have the luxury economically to do both, but most of us do not.
There are also technical barriers. While shooting and editing video is an activity that is well within the technical savvy of more and more people, there is admittedly still a predominant portion of our contemporarium that are not yet up to the entire task; not to mention being up to the frustration of posting that finished production up on the internet for all to see.
What we do see however, is that there is a vast sea of tech capable people now in our culture. These people do take time to shoot random, not so well crafted, moderately well edited, video content. There is really a huge volume of it. With this knowledge, there is a certainty that if the art could be made economically viable, people would try to do better at it. If it were possible to make a living, people would flock to the opportunity and give it their best. I think it safe to say that we haven’t seen the best yet.
In conclusion, may we just say that it should be a goal of programmers and strategists to figure out how to make the art of short episodic streaming video a profitable profession for main street Dick and Jane. Let them in on some of the profit potential and some of the advertising / networking power. Some strategist have been working programmatically on that kind of application. I know this, because I am one of them.
Jeff Rogers is the President and Founder of www.dragnetmarketing.com. He is an online networking strategist who believes that relationships are just as important online as they are face to face. In order to have good relationships one has to give something up to get something back. Mr. Rogers has made it his focus to make the give and take more fluent and utilitarian through his strategies. Get online and on the street tactical advantage with Dragnet Marketing strategies and self managed viral Video Pages.
