Challenge #3: Scaling the development of multimedia content
by Robbie, April 5, 2006
(* This is article 3 in a series on “Challenges with internet publishing”)
In Principle #3 and Problem #4 I suggest that internet publishers have an opportunity to use other forms of media such as audio, screencasting and web-enabled apps to enhance the learning experience of customers. Easier said than done. From my initial experience with screencasting, it is harder (i.e., more time consuming) to both author and edit video than text (which may be partly due to my inexperience with it). In fact, producing audio/video requires a completely different skillset. To make things worse, the skills that book authors and editors have aren’t very transferable to audio/video. It’s just different.
One of the good things about the print business is that it is highly distributable. You don’t need to have authors sitting beside editors to produce books. Multimedia content is trickier. You need a good environment to record audio and video. The computer needs to be configured a certain way to make videos look consistent, and the room has to be conducive to recording or it will sound like crap. Consistency in quality is something most publishers strive for and can obtain by making authors work within the confines of the publisher’s environment (the templates, wordlists, etc.). It is not as easy to enforce restrictions in the multimedia world.
Then you have the issue that some of the best writers might not be that good at creating audio/video. What do you do in that case? Perhaps you focus writers on writing and have a separate set of people do the multimedia content. That has its own challenges. I don’t have a lot of answers yet on how to scale the development of multimedia content, but it is something I will be spending a lot of time on over the next several months.
Consistency is hard, but the distribution piece is still easy even for videos, using new sites like YouTube. The past week alone saw the launch of a couple of sites along these lines: look at Om Malik’s recent postings on the issue.
Yoav Shapira April 5th, 2006
However, using YouTube isn’t really a viable business model for an internet publisher. But it could be a way to distribute freebies or partial clips to help with promotion. I looked on Om’s site, but didn’t see the post you are referring to. Can you send a link?
Robbie April 5th, 2006
Why isn’t using a service like YouTube (there are numerous others with small feature differences) a viable business model? It at least addresses the distribution without costing you bandwidth or storage, and most of these sites have easily configurable sharing option, so one could hypothetically share a video with someone only after they’ve paid you via PayPal…
Within the past couple of weeks, Om mentioned BubbleShare (http://www.bubbleshare.com/upload/mmflash) and GUBA (http://upload.guba.com/index.do). In the past couple of months, TechCrunch has covered blip.tv (http://www.blip.tv/) and Revver (http://www.revver.com/?__session_just_started__=1), the latter perhaps being of particular interest to you because there video posters make money directly as part of the site’s business model. These are just a few, there are at least a couple more whose names escape me at the moment and must have been covered elsewhere…
Yoav Shapira April 5th, 2006
Oh here are the others I had in mind, from today’s TechCrunch, and missed before: JumpCut (http://www.jumpcut.com/), MotionBox (http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/04/02/motionbox-best-online-video-sharing-so-far/), VideoEgg (http://www.videoegg.com/, seems to have some features for integrating into 3rd party sites that might be interesting to you), and Grouper (http://www.grouper.com/).
Yoav Shapira April 5th, 2006
I’m not terribly worried about distribution of video at this point. I’m worried more about how to get dozens of authors creating video that is consistent.
Sites like revver (thanks for the links) actually take a fairly significant chunk of the money (50% in their case). Since video is going to be such a core part of my offering, I want to have full control of how it is viewed, purchased, and hosted. That’s not to say there isn’t room to use services of these companies to increase my exposure, but going out of the shoot I don’t want to lead with them.
Robbie April 5th, 2006
Above looks like comment spam, you might want to enable captchas.
I see what you mean about control of the video offering. These sites don’t help with consistency at all, you’re right. But they have a decent distribution infrastructure, so that’s something, and they are also brand new babies essentially — one would assume they’d grow and mature (and consolidate) in the coming year…
Yoav Shapira April 6th, 2006