9 ms·

You can make a TV show and distribute it to everyone easily. That's not the problem. The problem is getting together the budget to make a good TV show, then mak

You can make a TV show and distribute it to everyone easily. That's not the problem. The problem is getting together the budget to make a good TV show, then making the ad revenue off of that show you need to make that profitable. Hulu might make that possible, but it hasn't yet.

netcan 18y ago
Maybe there is room for the ability to make TV shows that are of decent quality more cheaply. I'm not necessarily talking actors/directors heavy stuff. Up till now there has been a maxim. If it's on TV, it's making a substantial amount of money. If it's wasn't, it wouldn't be on TV. The result is that the cost of producing TV shows experienced very little downward pressure. There has never been good reason to take advantage of opportunities to make TV shows cheaply. That means there might be things that could have developed that haven't. What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary materials such as other lectures or pieces of documentaries. I imagine there would be patterns that emerge.
- sketerpot 18y ago
  > What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary materials such as other lectures or pieces of documentaries. I've actually been giving this a lot of thought recently, and I'm now convinced of a few things. First, lectures can and should become computerized. This needs to happen. Second, a simple video stream isn't going to cut it. What you want is several streams of various media: * A video of someone talking, gesturing, maybe writing something on a markerboard. This needs a certain amount of quality, depending on the lecture. You could record it at a high resolution and distribute reasonable-quality H.264 videos, and that should take care of it. * Slides. Darn near everybody has PowerPoint these days, or something similar. Whatever they use, it can generally be coerced into PDF format. How you actually send out the slides to viewers is a separate matter -- you might render them to PNG on your server so they don't have to fire up PDF software locally -- but you should have slides in a clear format that doesn't depend on a video stream being intelligible. No more "shaky camera looking at a projector screen" crap. Even Google Tech Talks has this problem, because they're still hampered by the just-a-video-stream model. * Table of contents. Have an outline of the subjects covered, so that people can skip around in the lecture and watch it out of order. It's the Internet way! * Supplementary material, as HTML. If the speaker is talking about TRIACs, have a link to the Wikipedia page on TRIACs in the slides. Have all links from the slides open up in a new tab, and have the browser window (or an iframe, or whatever) be alongside the video stream. This would be crazy nonlinear, but that's a good thing. * On the subject of tabbed browsing: have an equivalent of it for watching lecture videos. When the user opens up a new tab, pause the tab they were watching and duplicate all its state in a new tab. This way people can watch multiple parts of the same lecture (or, hell, even different lectures) at the same time. Remember the Wikipedia effect? Here's a succinct summary: http://xkcd.com/214/ http://xkcd.com/214/ People will literally click around reading wikipedia pages for hours, but that just wouldn't happen without the extremely interlinked, hypertextual, ADD-inducing format of Wikipedia. Imagine what school would be like if lectures could be made minimally painful like that. And of course you would want to make all the content available in multiple ways. Maybe have a desktop program for maximum slickness, a Flash-and-HTML version for people wanting quick web-based enlightenment, and an Android-based version for cell phones with a revamped UI.
  - netcan 18y ago
    I think your on the right train of thought. A sign that things are working out would be a lecture not being recognisable a lecture. But really, I was just think along a more basic line. A way to take in a lecture & (quickly & easily) produce a web-video based documentary. IE take a lecture. Slap the notes legibly on a split screen & let users to jump around via a table of content. Links could be good. Maybe even sprinkle in some stock photos or stock video to break up the monotony of staring at a lecturer for an hour.
    - sketerpot 18y ago
      We're on the same wavelength. If this is to catch on, it should be easy enough for someone to just jump in and make some content without reading the manual. That's a big challenge in its own right: how much multimedia editing functionality can you make trivially obvious?
      - netcan 18y ago
        I imagine that would depend on how limited what you are trying to achieve is. You could make it pretty easy if all it did was cut up a lecture into parts (table of contents) & annotated it.
    - aci 18y ago
      I've seen a simple implementation, with a splitscreen and a table of content based on the slides here: http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ The ability to see the slides on the split screen and jump to previous slides via the table of contents really helped me as a user much.
      - sketerpot 18y ago
        That is a clunky version of exactly what I'm talking about. Awesome.
    - madtownhacker 18y ago
- menloparkbum 18y ago
  Probably the biggest problem for university lectures right now is that video compression means you can't see what they are writing on the board. I thought this may have been a YouTube thing but it happens with iTunes video as well. Check out some of the Stanford CS video lectures, they are a great idea but mostly hopeless because you can't read anything that's on the board. If someone solved that seemingly minor problem video lectures would improve tenfold.
  - netcan 18y ago
    That was sort of my point. How difficult would it be to take those lectures & work them to the point of being a lot more useful? sketerpot' comment is all over this.
    - menloparkbum 18y ago
      Having made a video that was sold on DVD and been a TA for a university course, I'm pessimistic that any university lecturer would bother with the extra work to make the videos good. I had no idea before I did it, but video editing is hugely time consuming. I'm guessing to make a really good video lecture you'd have to spend about 10-20 hours per lecture. Hours prepping the slides, the room, coordinating 2 camera guys, syncing audio after the fact, editing the video, etc. sketerpot's comments are great, but I'm a pessimist. With current tools it would take too much work from the lecturer to make truly good videos. My point was that at a bare minimum if you somehow could make what's appearing on the board visible in the video, you'd at least make the experience as useful as being in the class. As it stands now, you're better off just listening to the audio. However, there's a lot of room for technical innovation. Software to help automate the production work needed to make good lecture videos would be a cool startup idea.
    - mseebach 18y ago
      Touch-sensitive black/whiteboard and Twiddla replay? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496331 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496331
froo 18y ago
The problem is getting together the budget to make a good TV show. This is actually a problem I'm working on now which I'll be applying to YC with as soon as I figure out if I can pull it off. I was ranting in #startups on freenode the other day about the cost of production being the thing that needs to change for the game to change. I've got a thought on how to do that, but it just requires a little time to see if its possible or still just a theory.
- DomesticMouse 18y ago
  Where are the cost centers in production? I've watched some guys I know get together and make films using pro-am hd cameras, and then edit it down on a mac pro. Would building an online service that allows people to mail in hd tapes, and then edit online via a flex app help? You could use AWS clusters to handle the rendering compute load.
  - cchooper 18y ago
    I don't know about TV, but for a very low budget film the major costs are: 1. Talent (although assuming you write and direct yourself, and use unknown actors, this can be brought down to under a few thousand). 2. Film stock and processing (over 50k with celluloid, but obviously digital is much cheaper). 3. Equipment (camera, dollies, lights etc.): 40k 4. Crew: 70k for a 2 week shoot with a cheap crew, including catering 5. Post production: 40-60k This sort of money will get you a surprisingly professional looking 90 minute film. However, production costs on film are always eclipsed by marketing costs. It can cost thousands of dollars just to market a film to the distributors, no matter to consumers. Obviously, you can make a film for much less than this, but only if you want to make a film like Clerks or In The Company Of Men (i.e. one location, shot in a weekend).
    - dkokelley 18y ago
      2. Film stock and processing (over 50k with celluloid, but obviously digital is much cheaper). And if you're shooting a web show you don't need the high quality film because the ultimate medium is digital anyways.
chris11 18y ago
It actually has been done. Joss Whedon produced Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog during the writer's strike. It was definitely a high quality production. And it was well received. Also, after DVD's and songs on Itunes, Joss Whedon has recouped all of the costs. I do see your point though. Making high quality video is very hard. It cost Joss Whedon around $200,000 to make. And Joss Whedon has a cult following, so just having his name on it gave the project a lot of P.R. And Joss Whedon has been involved with Hollywood movies and television shows, so he has the experience necessary to make a high quality show. I wonder if the entertainment industry is headed to a model comparable to venture capitalism. Media Companies might be forced to split their services into two sections. They would act like a vc firm and give money to producers in exchange for a percent of the gross. And they could sell access to their distribution network. I'm sure that no media company would want to do this willingly though. It would mean giving up control over the ip rights, and they would have to find new distribution methods. Hulu:http://www.hulu.com/watch/28327/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog-act-one http://www.hulu.com/watch/28327/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog... Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Horrible%27s_Sing-Along_Blog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Horrible%27s_Sing-Along_Blo...
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  Yeah, when Radiohead did well releasing a CD online, everyone said "see, it works for Radiohead, it can work for anyone." The problem is that anyone is not Radiohead, or Joss Whedon. Recouping $200k is neat as an experiment, but hardy the foundation of a replacement to television as we know it. One episode of your favorite TV drama alone likely costs much more than that. If your favorite TV drama is Lost, it's 50x that. The entertainment industry already has a model very similar to what you just described, just instead of distributing it over the net, they do so to theaters and customers by way of DVD. See http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-distribution.htm http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-distribution.ht... . It explains why you see two or three production credits before the opening sequence of each movie, those are basically their equivalent of VCs.
- menloparkbum 18y ago
  I wonder if the entertainment industry is headed to a model comparable to venture capitalism. Isn't it like this already? Shows like 30 Rock and The Late Show are created by production companies owned by Tina Fey and David Letterman. The shows are jointly owned by the production companies and the star's production companies. Even smaller potatoes productions are owned by production companies, not the networks. I.e. all that crap like "Rob and Big" on MTV is joint owned by MTV and a production company owned by some random dudes. The finance and ownership issues relating to TV and Film are probably more sophisticated than high-tech venture capital.

netcan 18y ago

Maybe there is room for the ability to make TV shows that are of decent quality more cheaply. I'm not necessarily talking actors/directors heavy stuff. Up till now there has been a maxim. If it's on TV, it's making a substantial amount of money. If it's wasn't, it wouldn't be on TV. The result is that the cost of producing TV shows experienced very little downward pressure. There has never been good reason to take advantage of opportunities to make TV shows cheaply. That means there might be things that could have developed that haven't. What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary materials such as other lectures or pieces of documentaries. I imagine there would be patterns that emerge.

sketerpot 18y ago
> What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary materials such as other lectures or pieces of documentaries. I've actually been giving this a lot of thought recently, and I'm now convinced of a few things. First, lectures can and should become computerized. This needs to happen. Second, a simple video stream isn't going to cut it. What you want is several streams of various media: * A video of someone talking, gesturing, maybe writing something on a markerboard. This needs a certain amount of quality, depending on the lecture. You could record it at a high resolution and distribute reasonable-quality H.264 videos, and that should take care of it. * Slides. Darn near everybody has PowerPoint these days, or something similar. Whatever they use, it can generally be coerced into PDF format. How you actually send out the slides to viewers is a separate matter -- you might render them to PNG on your server so they don't have to fire up PDF software locally -- but you should have slides in a clear format that doesn't depend on a video stream being intelligible. No more "shaky camera looking at a projector screen" crap. Even Google Tech Talks has this problem, because they're still hampered by the just-a-video-stream model. * Table of contents. Have an outline of the subjects covered, so that people can skip around in the lecture and watch it out of order. It's the Internet way! * Supplementary material, as HTML. If the speaker is talking about TRIACs, have a link to the Wikipedia page on TRIACs in the slides. Have all links from the slides open up in a new tab, and have the browser window (or an iframe, or whatever) be alongside the video stream. This would be crazy nonlinear, but that's a good thing. * On the subject of tabbed browsing: have an equivalent of it for watching lecture videos. When the user opens up a new tab, pause the tab they were watching and duplicate all its state in a new tab. This way people can watch multiple parts of the same lecture (or, hell, even different lectures) at the same time. Remember the Wikipedia effect? Here's a succinct summary: http://xkcd.com/214/ http://xkcd.com/214/ People will literally click around reading wikipedia pages for hours, but that just wouldn't happen without the extremely interlinked, hypertextual, ADD-inducing format of Wikipedia. Imagine what school would be like if lectures could be made minimally painful like that. And of course you would want to make all the content available in multiple ways. Maybe have a desktop program for maximum slickness, a Flash-and-HTML version for people wanting quick web-based enlightenment, and an Android-based version for cell phones with a revamped UI.
- netcan 18y ago
  I think your on the right train of thought. A sign that things are working out would be a lecture not being recognisable a lecture. But really, I was just think along a more basic line. A way to take in a lecture & (quickly & easily) produce a web-video based documentary. IE take a lecture. Slap the notes legibly on a split screen & let users to jump around via a table of content. Links could be good. Maybe even sprinkle in some stock photos or stock video to break up the monotony of staring at a lecturer for an hour.
  - sketerpot 18y ago
    We're on the same wavelength. If this is to catch on, it should be easy enough for someone to just jump in and make some content without reading the manual. That's a big challenge in its own right: how much multimedia editing functionality can you make trivially obvious?
    - netcan 18y ago
      I imagine that would depend on how limited what you are trying to achieve is. You could make it pretty easy if all it did was cut up a lecture into parts (table of contents) & annotated it.
  - aci 18y ago
    I've seen a simple implementation, with a splitscreen and a table of content based on the slides here: http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ The ability to see the slides on the split screen and jump to previous slides via the table of contents really helped me as a user much.
    - sketerpot 18y ago
      That is a clunky version of exactly what I'm talking about. Awesome.
  - madtownhacker 18y ago
menloparkbum 18y ago
Probably the biggest problem for university lectures right now is that video compression means you can't see what they are writing on the board. I thought this may have been a YouTube thing but it happens with iTunes video as well. Check out some of the Stanford CS video lectures, they are a great idea but mostly hopeless because you can't read anything that's on the board. If someone solved that seemingly minor problem video lectures would improve tenfold.
- netcan 18y ago
  That was sort of my point. How difficult would it be to take those lectures & work them to the point of being a lot more useful? sketerpot' comment is all over this.
  - menloparkbum 18y ago
    Having made a video that was sold on DVD and been a TA for a university course, I'm pessimistic that any university lecturer would bother with the extra work to make the videos good. I had no idea before I did it, but video editing is hugely time consuming. I'm guessing to make a really good video lecture you'd have to spend about 10-20 hours per lecture. Hours prepping the slides, the room, coordinating 2 camera guys, syncing audio after the fact, editing the video, etc. sketerpot's comments are great, but I'm a pessimist. With current tools it would take too much work from the lecturer to make truly good videos. My point was that at a bare minimum if you somehow could make what's appearing on the board visible in the video, you'd at least make the experience as useful as being in the class. As it stands now, you're better off just listening to the audio. However, there's a lot of room for technical innovation. Software to help automate the production work needed to make good lecture videos would be a cool startup idea.
  - mseebach 18y ago
    Touch-sensitive black/whiteboard and Twiddla replay? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496331 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496331

froo 18y ago

The problem is getting together the budget to make a good TV show. This is actually a problem I'm working on now which I'll be applying to YC with as soon as I figure out if I can pull it off. I was ranting in #startups on freenode the other day about the cost of production being the thing that needs to change for the game to change. I've got a thought on how to do that, but it just requires a little time to see if its possible or still just a theory.

DomesticMouse 18y ago
Where are the cost centers in production? I've watched some guys I know get together and make films using pro-am hd cameras, and then edit it down on a mac pro. Would building an online service that allows people to mail in hd tapes, and then edit online via a flex app help? You could use AWS clusters to handle the rendering compute load.
- cchooper 18y ago
  I don't know about TV, but for a very low budget film the major costs are: 1. Talent (although assuming you write and direct yourself, and use unknown actors, this can be brought down to under a few thousand). 2. Film stock and processing (over 50k with celluloid, but obviously digital is much cheaper). 3. Equipment (camera, dollies, lights etc.): 40k 4. Crew: 70k for a 2 week shoot with a cheap crew, including catering 5. Post production: 40-60k This sort of money will get you a surprisingly professional looking 90 minute film. However, production costs on film are always eclipsed by marketing costs. It can cost thousands of dollars just to market a film to the distributors, no matter to consumers. Obviously, you can make a film for much less than this, but only if you want to make a film like Clerks or In The Company Of Men (i.e. one location, shot in a weekend).
  - dkokelley 18y ago
    2. Film stock and processing (over 50k with celluloid, but obviously digital is much cheaper). And if you're shooting a web show you don't need the high quality film because the ultimate medium is digital anyways.

chris11 18y ago

It actually has been done. Joss Whedon produced Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog during the writer's strike. It was definitely a high quality production. And it was well received. Also, after DVD's and songs on Itunes, Joss Whedon has recouped all of the costs. I do see your point though. Making high quality video is very hard. It cost Joss Whedon around $200,000 to make. And Joss Whedon has a cult following, so just having his name on it gave the project a lot of P.R. And Joss Whedon has been involved with Hollywood movies and television shows, so he has the experience necessary to make a high quality show. I wonder if the entertainment industry is headed to a model comparable to venture capitalism. Media Companies might be forced to split their services into two sections. They would act like a vc firm and give money to producers in exchange for a percent of the gross. And they could sell access to their distribution network. I'm sure that no media company would want to do this willingly though. It would mean giving up control over the ip rights, and they would have to find new distribution methods. Hulu:http://www.hulu.com/watch/28327/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog-act-one http://www.hulu.com/watch/28327/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog... Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Horrible%27s_Sing-Along_Blog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Horrible%27s_Sing-Along_Blo...

mattmaroon 18y ago
Yeah, when Radiohead did well releasing a CD online, everyone said "see, it works for Radiohead, it can work for anyone." The problem is that anyone is not Radiohead, or Joss Whedon. Recouping $200k is neat as an experiment, but hardy the foundation of a replacement to television as we know it. One episode of your favorite TV drama alone likely costs much more than that. If your favorite TV drama is Lost, it's 50x that. The entertainment industry already has a model very similar to what you just described, just instead of distributing it over the net, they do so to theaters and customers by way of DVD. See http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-distribution.htm http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-distribution.ht... . It explains why you see two or three production credits before the opening sequence of each movie, those are basically their equivalent of VCs.
menloparkbum 18y ago
I wonder if the entertainment industry is headed to a model comparable to venture capitalism. Isn't it like this already? Shows like 30 Rock and The Late Show are created by production companies owned by Tina Fey and David Letterman. The shows are jointly owned by the production companies and the star's production companies. Even smaller potatoes productions are owned by production companies, not the networks. I.e. all that crap like "Rob and Big" on MTV is joint owned by MTV and a production company owned by some random dudes. The finance and ownership issues relating to TV and Film are probably more sophisticated than high-tech venture capital.