This is good news for those of us trying to build new content businesses on the Web: ABC tested out streaming shows online and found good success for advertisers, Ad Age will report tomorrow, Jeff Jarvis says.
In other video news? Chris Pirillo and Leo Laporte wants to rebuild TechTV. Um, Chris and Leo, the community is already doing that — albeit better. (And, Michael says in the comments below, Leo Laporte has already done an awesome job of replicating the best content in the This Week in Tech podcast).
Why? TV was limited by the massive audience it needed. Everytime I was on TechTV I had an image in my mind that they were burning $100 bills in the middle of the floor. Actually, if I had imagined $1,000 bills the image would have been more accurate.
How do you get a mass audience? By pandering to lowest-common-denominator stuff. Translation: you have to dumb down your content. I remember talking with Leo Laporte and this would drive him nuts. He actually wanted to make the content even geekier. Sometimes he succeeded in talking about how to setup your own Web server on a Linux machine, but that was about how geeky it would get.
But on the Internet I don’t need to dumb down my content. The costs of doing content are so low that if I want to do a cooking show for geeks I can. Just get a $300 camcorder and start putting videos up on Google Video or You Tube.
Translation: TechTV is already here and it’s WAY better than what was on the real TV network. Did TechTV ever put videos up to teach you how to do something really geeky like use ASP.NET 2.0? No. They couldn’t have. They would have pissed off 90% of their audience.
But we don’t need to worry about that and that’s a good thing!
NicheTV is here. It’s even better than TechTV. And the advertisers like it too!
