video

1. There are no quality online video series.
2. Online Video has no viable commercial future.

…or so Ari Rosenberg asserts in his April 29th Online Publishing Insider article, Online Video Has No Character .

In this post I’m focusing on Ari’s first premise- there is very little quality original content on the web.  (My focus here is original online video series- television content repurposed for the internet is, as Ari notes, an entirely different story).

When I first started working in online video almost four years ago I had the opportunity to hear the incredibly inspiring online video pioneer Fred Seibert speak.  Fred had recently launched  Next New Networks, and espoused his view that there, in the salad days of online video, we needn’t waste time and money striving for perfection because for now at least  ”good enough” was enough to be successful online.

Four years later “good enough” has produced thousands of hours of “who cares?”. Most video series are fine, sometimes well written sometimes well acted, sometimes well shot…in fact I would describe most video content as fine, but ”not good enough for tv”.

Now that’s depressing. For the first time in entertainment history, independent artists have the ability to green light their own passions, to have their work viewed by a global audience, to shape cultural history. Instead, collectively we have arrived at a paradigm of derivatism and mediocrity. In fact I think the notion of TV is indeed the very problem, right down to the .tv domain. The term “internet tv” implies TV budgets, TV stars, TV formats and a one way viewing experience.  Already we are doing ourselves a disservice.

Online video series may not offer big stars or big budgets, but online we have the opportunity to invent new creative paradigms.  No longer constrained by the 2 dimensional 4.3 screen, or FTC rules or 22 minute story arcs or corporate funders or expensive production that forces us to cater to the common denominator,  we have the occasion to expand our idea of visual storytelling, to build new and unimagined interactive storytelling experiences and to harness our  communities in ways bound only by current technology, which itself is constantly evolving and creating new creative possibilities.

Online video series and the artists that create them will thrive when we embrace the interactive properties that are inherent to the internet. This is where our creative strength lies. This is where they key to compelling story lines and original, memorable characters lie. And who knows, maybe we’ll even stumble upon a business model along the way.

I’ll address Ari’s second point about online videos long term commercial viability in a follow-up post.

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