IP Democracy: Web Video Content is a Different Creature

With Yahoo’s retreat from its ambitious agenda of creating original TV shows for the web, the post-mortems are already rolling in. And some of them, including this piece from the LA Times’ Chris Gaither, are starting to zero in on a fundamental truth about the rise of a new electronic medium: business models don’t transfer from an old medium to a new medium.

By that I mean the Internet is a different creature from television which was a different creature from radio and on and on, so it’s foolish to think you can do the same thing on the web that has proven to be a success on television. Television broadcasters learned this kind of lesson early when they attempted to develop new programming for TV by simply taking radio dramas and comedies and televising them.

That wholesale transport of radio to television didn’t work. And while the analogy breaks down a bit with the Internet, the traditional TV model won’t work on the web for the very same reason. Different media require different kinds of content.

Or as an entertainment entrepreneur says in Gaither’s piece

“If you’re trying to create ‘I Love Lucy’ on the Internet, I wouldn’t want to be in that business,” said Joel Wright, a former Yahoo executive who last year founded SlingShot Media, a talent agency for digital projects.

As Gaither’s piece points out, web-based video is a success with just a fraction of the audience that traditional TV shows require to be deemed successful. Moreover, the rise of cheap user-generated video is hammering away at the high-cost production model that dominates TV.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on March 4, 2006 11:08 AM to IP Democracy