Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures recently wrote an insightful post about his thoughts on online video, which to summarise boils down to ‘VC’s can’t quite see the business model yet and we’ve been burnt before‘.
I found myself digesting the 59 lengthy comments all of which merit 10 minutes of your time, but Rob Long’s stood out in particular:
‘I think the key, for the next few years, anyway, is going to be managing to do 2 things at once: build powerful sifting engines that create personal channels that deliver and anticipate what you want to watch, through friend recommendations, etc.; but also on the content side, building audience behavior (remember: the 2 hour movie or 1/2 hour sitcom are pretty recent developments in human entertainment) by among other things replicating Wallstrip all over the place, in a thousand different niche areas. A Wallstrip for lacrosse. A Wallstrip for cars. A Wallstrip for country music….
Most of them will fail. Most of them will be awful. But that’s sort of the way it goes. Most things don’t work. But some will pop. And two or three years from now, the audience will be used to getting their news this way.
I think pure entertainment web video will work the same way: sure, some of it right now is lame, but somebody’s going to get a hit, somehow. And it will be because the product was good, consistent, tightly focused, and especially lucky, and because they used new tools to get the product in front of a targeted niche audience, which then was encouraged (compensated, even?) to share it and share it and share it.’
Finding relevant video, actually scrap that, finding new video you want to watch is the biggest challenge facing online video distribution. Last.fm are reportedly working on a video scrobbler, but surely that entails reading the videos on our hard drive and the so they’ll end up scrobbling our home movies and downloads from file sharing sites, which we simply don’t have!
So my friends get to see I like watching cats fighting Sesame Street toys and Superbad with Korean subtitles. Yee ha.
I don’t want an algorithm suggesting what I might like to watch, I want a human editor(s), a trusted voice, I want an army of comedically gifted drones reporting to a virtual foreman on their video finds and I want the results delivered to wherever I am, be it Facebook, my mobile or my desktop for later consumption.
Finding quality video is increasingly difficult, particularly original web UK comedy.
