Is the title of this posting the future of video journalism?
Here’s my take on the current landscape of video content distribution in the year 2008.
TV Week has a brief story about comScore metrics that put web videoviewership at 10 billion in February 2008, up 66% from February 2007. Googlesites, primarily YouTube, have a 35.4% share of that.
The article states 135 millions users watched 75 videos per person for 2.7 minutes each.
If you look at these stats, and integrate the sobering statistics of less viewership of traditional TV News broadcast and the continued snowballing decline of newspaper readership with its bleeding revenue losses and the associated layoffs, this formula seems to point to developing a new paradigm of presenting news as factual entertainment - a paradigm shift indeed.
This is one of the components that is part of the equation associated with online content distribution. The critical issues surrounding this new way of viewing content is monetizing the material through effective, profitable advertising. No one has yet been able to develop the right formula to do this as of now.
The puzzle pieces are slowly being placed with the advertising portion being that one piece of the puzzle you go hunting around for in a stack of similar looking pieces - trying to find that one perfect fit.
Many factors are coming into play right now that I have been vocal about. Acquisition equipment and post production methodologies are the mainstay of producing content. I have felt strongly that there doesn’t need to be expensive equipment to produce quality content for online content distribution, even for possible television broadcast deployment - the same can be said for computers used for post production of video projects. Reduce the costs of shooting and editing a project, you then can bring your costs for ad space down and in turn, your ad rates become more appealing to a potential advertiser.
There is a balance between being true to the art of VJ’ism (yes it is a creative endeavor) and needing financial resources for funding internet broadcast projects.
As of yet - no one has found that happy medium.
