A VC« Belle and Sebastian Last Night | Main | Umair is Wrong »
Videoblogging vs TV
Chartreuse has an interesting post about the future of TV (not bullish).
Here is the most interesting part of the post:
How many people do you think it takes to produce The Abram Report on MSNBC?
It was watched in (on avg.) 215,000 homes per day last week.
Rocketboom was watched (on avg) in 200,000 homes per day last week.
Just like the music business, television has become economically unfeasable at it’s present size.
Comments (8) | | TrackBack (0)
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b2c969e200e55036934f8834
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Videoblogging vs TV:
Posted March 3, 2006 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
It's way more subtle than this posting makes it out to be. It's an apples and oranges comparison.
Rocketboom is a great. It probably has 50-70% market penetration in it's target audience. There's what, maybe 400 or 500,000 digerati's and digerati wannabe's. RB reaches most of them.
RB is a big fish in small pond.
Here's a question:
Could the RB crew of 2 people do 45 minutes a day instead of just 3? 45 minutes takes a lot of writers and producers. Amanda is great for 3 minutes, her schtick would get really tiring after 10 minutes. The number of ads (you know revenue...) is proportional to the length of the programming. So RB has 5 avails a week and Abram Report has about 150 avails a week.
Try comparing revenue/FT employee and I'll bet you'll discover they're not far off of one another.
Posted by: Erik Schwartz | Mar 3, 2006 9:08:42 AM
Eric,
Now this is a discussion that needs to be had.
The point of my post (and yeah, it wasn't subtle) is what Fred post:television has become economically unfeasable at it’s present size.
I used to work for major music labels. We had a staff of thousands spread through out the world.
In order to pay so many people we had to generate hits. Huge hits.
Broadcast television is the same. They have to produce monster ratings to pay for huge overhead.
But how will they be able to compete when everybody has a channel?
RB is not really that good. I don't watch it. It's not targeted to me. But that show is the future. Short, interesting content that can be watched on any device. It's mobile perfect. It's targeted. It's cheap.
Very few people are going to pay to watch The Abrams Report on mobile devices. It's too long.
The new revenue streams RB has available may trump the 150 avails Abrams has. But even if it doesn't it's so much cheaper to produce that it ends up much more profitable.
I agree with you that premium content is important (saw it on your website!). I just think that future audiences will gravitate more to the 5 minute Angelina Jolie channel than sit through 30 minutes of Entertainment Tonight.
Posted by: chartreuse | Mar 3, 2006 9:52:39 AM
it's not a simple comparison, but it is certainly illuminating.
erik's right, of course, that revenues are the apples to apples comparison.
but there's no question that over time, the rocketbooms will get bigger and start to make more money.
on average, they'll still be smaller than cable networks.
but in aggregate, they'll be meaningful.
Posted by: Nicholas | Mar 3, 2006 10:45:49 AM
Look at what television is. It's fundamentally a passive "lean back", escapist medium. You're not going to replace that functionality with 100's of little shows.
Do I think there's a future in hundreds of narrowcast programs (audio or video) that are targeted in an individual way? You bet I do. I'm building a company on it. It is fundamentally a different model though. Narrowcast programming is active "lean forward" medium.
But will that kill long form television? The hour long escape that is L&O: * or CSI: * or The Sopranos. The background noise in the kitchen that is Oprah or ET. No way.
Posted by: Erik | Mar 3, 2006 12:05:05 PM
does anybody think web video "ratings" and audience metrics are worth a darn? true, nielsen ratings are the worst possible measurement system... except for all the other ones. web audience measurement is so painfully raw and loose and able to be manipulated its ridiculous. the arguments here are interesting, and worth having for sure, but its hard to take claims about rocketbooms audience size with any seriousness. 200K viewers/day? 120K? both were cited authoritatively just in this debate on this blog. its just so easy to jam the web measurement services, i always assume web audience size stats are 100% exaggerated, ergo a claim of 100K viewers represents, if actually scrutinized, actually 50K viewers...
Posted by: steve | Mar 3, 2006 2:22:09 PM
This comparison is completely illogical.
1. First, the medium. I doubt if many ppl can watch a long video on youtube.
2. Two, the competition - hey remember the next youtube video is on the same site, and better still, google video is just a ctrl-n away.
3. Third, the industry. it will all add up - u get returns for what you spend. you cannot make a 10 minute video and expect to beat the TV biggies when it comes to ad revenue.
Posted by: Srinivasan | Mar 3, 2006 7:41:12 PM
My team, viddler, is announcing our private beta, and demoing our product, at Tepper at Carnegie Melon. If you want to see a online video product that is 3 years ahead of the curve with a rockstar team, please ping me at any time.
Posted by: Rob Sandie | Mar 5, 2006 12:05:09 PM
I have to agree w/ Erik on this one, Chartreuse's comparison may hold up when comparing narrowcast programming across platforms--low rated cable news networks are a classic example to which Watson used to point to back in the day.
But American Idol was watched by 18 million households last Tuesday and 20 million last Wednesday--a lame ass freaking amateur hour program which is less costly that traditional entertainment programming because you don't have to pay most of the talent!
Dancing with the Stars reached 17 million, Grey's Anatomy 16.5.
It's no secret that TV news is not a big economic winner. But entertainment programming often is and it's not going away. It's way overstated to say that TV programming is no longer economically feasible.
That said, I also disagree w/ Srivanisan--of course people can watch video for as long as they want on YouTube or whatever next gen service comes along (from video ipods to cpu & Net based services), furthermore, with companies like Verizon offering fiber to the home w/ downstream speeds of 30 Mbs at pricing competitive w/ 1.5 Mbs cable modem service, IP-switched networks will be the primary way in which HD video programming reaches critical mass in American households.
Posted by: Jason Chervokas | Mar 6, 2006 8:24:33 AM
Main RSS Feed of All Posts
VC and Technology Posts Only
