My 6-year old is on my Mac all the time….
I always like to spend time in Britain.
It’s the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and the place where our world was born.
The arrival of harnessed waterpower and then steam gave birth to factories, and the mass production of physical products at very low cost.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, physical things were produced make-piece, by hand, item by item.
Industrialization changed all that, but in very short order, the ability to manufacture physical things began to outpace our ability to keep track of exactly what we were doing. While factories might spit out reams of paper, yards of fabric or completed automobiles, management was still trying to track cost and productivity using ledger books and pen and ink.
In 1912 it took 1,260 man-hours to produce a Model T. By 1923, with the streamlining of the assembly line, Ford was able to turn out a car with only 228 man hours.
The streamlining of the processing of information would not really begin until IBM introduced mainframes in the 1950s and even that was only the beginning.
The arrival of the web, Google and the Intel revolution shifted information and data processing into high gear – so much so that it has now left physical manufacturing processes in the dust.
While we can scatter billions of electrons across cyberspace at the touch of a button, and at no cost, much of our physical manufacturing processes are still caught in the 1930s.
Let’s take the process of making a television program.
While we can distribute them at will over platforms like Hulu; and put them into 2 billion homes instantly and for almost no cost, when it comes to manufacturing them, we are still in the cottage industry era.
An endless and vastly over-staffed process of producer, director, DP, cameraman, sound engineer, PA, AP and God only knows what else, consuming days, weeks and sometimes even months to laboriously crank out one hour of television that is gone in…. an hour.
It’s expensive.
It’s wasteful.
It’s archaic.
And it does not mesh with an information processing system that consumes hours of video, quite literally, by the second.
There is an imbalance here, between the expectations of a digital distribution world and a product manufacturing world that is still in the craft era.
But what is the solution?
Probably not Henry Ford type ‘video factories’ or assembly lines with $5 an hour workers.
If we seek to fill the demand, we should look at web-based models that already work.
Wikipedia is one such model. It produces vast volumes of very high intellectual content all the time at a very cost-effective rate.
Were we to contemplate starting an Encyclopedia today, in the world of online would we:
A. Hire a bunch of very smart PhDs from Harvard and Oxford, get them some dedicated library space and give them 20 years to crank out the next edition?
B. Open up the online world to anyone who felt they were an ‘expert’ in a particular area, let them upload content and let the community self-edit?
Hopefully, your answer is B.
Which is what makes Wikipedia so successful and so generally accurate.
Now, do we have the courage to apply Wikipedia’s model to the world of television content production?
All the tools are in place. All the participants are ready to go.
What’s lacking so far is the Henry Ford of the Television world.
Addendum: Ironically, just after posting this, I read in Reuters that the Disney Corporation, having suffered an astonishing 97% drop in revenues is now “looking bey0nd the studio model”
6 Comments
Rachelle May 07, 2009
This article I linked below still touts traditional video as being more popular than online video …
but it’s interesting to see they also estimate online video ad sales more than doubling over the next 2 years.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=105275
Paul May 06, 2009
Murdoch nails his colours to the mast:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/07/rupert-murdoch-charging-websites
Echos of what you were saying recently
Brendon Brooks May 06, 2009
So, who’s making money during this video venture ?
Even if the cost of production and the time it takes to create content goes down at the end of the day we the content provider must get paid.
A decent camera like a Canon XH-A1 costs a little over $2500. Any smaller HD camera that is worth it’s weight is still in the $450-$1000 range. Now add everything else (laptop for video editing, software, fees for server, domain name registrar, etc)
The point is that I’m not convinced that any form of online advertising is going to cover the costs that justifies the hiring of professional VJ’s.
I suppose that is the price we pay for the democratization of our trade.
prw May 06, 2009
For some reason the cite did not work for the quote I provided above, it’s from the NYTimes Carpetbagger blocg:
http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/operating-income-in-disneys-movie-division-plummeted-97-percent/?scp=3&sq=Disney&st=cse
prw May 06, 2009
It was the operating income of the movie division at Disney that suffered the 97% loss, not the entire corporation as implied the in Addendum and the period was for the second quarter only. They are making crappy movies.
Disney’s television business actually isn’t doing all that bad:
Erik Gunn May 06, 2009
Erik Gunn says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
May 6, 2009 at 7:37 am
Friend Michael, I basically see your point, but I’ll pick a few nits. Accept these in the spirit of friendly debate.
1) “Let’s take the process of making a television program….we are still in the cottage industry era.â€
Actually, Michael, no, where TV programming is concerned, we have been in the industrial era. And the model you’re suggesting we move to is really more akin to the cottage industry.
2) In fact, the image of the future you’re depicting reflects a return to earlier days, when people made their own culture and it spread virally (think of folk songs spread by wandering troubadors) rather than having it mass produced for and then marketed to them.
Not necessarily saying that’s a bad thing, by itself. But I think the tweaking of the analogy that I suggest here is important in gaining a clearer sense of what’s going on–or, at least, a sense of the potential in what’s going on.
3) A few days ago you pointed out a successful example of the sort of cottage-industry video journalism you’re trying to help bring to life. I grant that is was well done. I also grant that it probably fills a felt need in the marketplace for information.
But I can’t help but notice that it was, ultimately, about selling stuff.
You and I and others in our Columbia J-School class have been mourning the unexpected death of our friend and colleague John Wilke, investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal and a reporter’s reporter if there ever was one.
Read John’s obit at the WSJ, and especially the comments appended there by his friends and colleagues, and it’s clear the kind of work he did and the way he approached it demanded time, energy, patience, rigor, self-discipline and precision.
What worries me is whether the media model to which we seem to be heading will find a way to support the important and necessary kind of journalism to which John devoted his lifetime.