Everybody’s doing it — investing in original web video that is. John Paul Titlow’s RWW piece highlighting Hulu’s announcement that they’re going to be spending $500MM in “new content initiatives” points out the next potential front for new content models and economics to take center stage.
Now I’m not here to sound the death knell of traditional television — but the ability to inexpensively bring cameras, people and scripts together in a room, studio or out to the field to produce content that is interesting, funny, targeted and timely is indisputable.
I experienced this first hand during my time in LA at Fox Sports Interactive as we scaled an original programming operation relatively far from the Fox lot. Those were still very much “walk before you run” days, and the evolution has continued as more of the traditional TV folks have leaned in to see what the “digital guys” are up to. And now at Bleacher Report, video has increasingly become part of our DNA and is an extension of our next gen digital publishing platform.
Video certainly opens up the creative opportunities to a meritocracy of ideas and talent. The barriers of entry are no longer access to studio infrastructure and big time budgets. Throw in mobile distribution and the opportunities are endless in terms of the corpus of original video that can be created for consumers across thousands and thousands of topic interests. And it can all be done for far less than $500MM.
Originally published on Medium on January 19, 2012. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.