VJ 2.0

I’m late for the meeting on the 23rd floor

Youtube now houses a mind-blowing 28 billion videos.

At an average of 2 minutes per video (and that’s probably low), Youtube houses 56 billion minutes of video content. That would be 933 million hours of content or enough to fill the 500 channel cable landscape for the next 640 years. All with original programming.

And Youtube is 4 years old.

That is a LOT of programming.

That is a LOT of video content.

Anyone ever been to the Youtube Building?

Anyone ever taken the ‘studio tour’?

Is there even a Youtube Building?

For what is clearly the largest and most productive TV operation on the planet, they don’t occupy a lot of real estate.

Here is my neighbor, NBC.

It’s a very big building

Here they produce enough content to fill a lot of NBC, CNBC and MSNBC every day.

The NBC building, which used to be the RCA building was built in 1933, at the height of the depression and at a time when radio was the cominant medium in the world.  Note, Radio City Music Hall.  Radio was then vastly complicated to produce and transmit. Television was even worse.

The NBC building reflects the technology of the 1930s, and the architecture does as well.

The notion of studios, edit suites, even offices was the rule of thumb for TV production throughout the 1960s, 70s and so on.

No more.

You don’t need them

In fact, you don’t want them.

They are very expensive.

And they circumscribe the amount of time that a TV maker can actually spend making the product.

Commuting, for one thing.

Not to mention all those meetings.

And the snack machine.

The whole notion of an office, or commuting to the office, or even of ‘going to work’ is a product of the Industrial Revolution in England more than 200 years ago.

There, for the first time, the machines of assembling cotton and turning it into textiles required great centralized production facilities

Factories.

And workers had to go to the factory to operate the machines.

have you finished editing that story yet?

TV studios are nothing more than an electronic iteration of that ‘factory’ thinking.

Centralized places where the content is made.

You had to do this with textiles because the machinery to make them was big and expensive and needed lots of power.

In the RCA days of the media, you also had to do this with television for the same reason.

Today, that reason is gone.

The machinery for producing television is your laptop and more or less, your iPhone.

But the factory building still remains.

Now, as local TV stations and networks seek to cut costs, the first they they do is lay off the staffers, the very people who are producing the content that they are selling.

This is suicidal.

In the end this will only lead to a continual downward spiral as the quality of the product continues to deteriorate.

The thing to fire…. is the building.

You don’t need it.

In fact, you don’t want it.

It’s a very expensive remnant of an earlier era.

As Youtube and the web so clearly demonstrate, you can produce and upload the content from anywhere in the world.

At any time, – not between 9 and 5.

And at the end of the day, the only thing the viewer gets to see… is the content.

When you look at it, the building, and all the ‘stuff’ that goes with it, is your single greatest expense.

And ironically, it’s not only something you no longer need – it’s actually something that is holding back the quality of the product.

So get rid of it

And not the employees.