Hulu might make that possible, but it hasn't yet.
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...
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Horrible%27s_Sing-Along_Blo...
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.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.
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.
The problem is getting together the budget to make a good TV show.
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.
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.
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).
And if you're shooting a web show you don't need the high quality film because the ultimate medium is digital anyways.
To take over TV, you need to at least match the picture quality of made-for-TV movies, and probably match 1080i resolution.
Then again, if anyone has more experience in the industry please correct me.
Edit: Also, the reason for the poor quality is probably not due to the quality of the original film. I would think it's more of a compression/bandwidth issue.
I still believe in film as an art form but for a commercial production webshow it may be overkill, especially as HD cameras get better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_overlay
You're probably thinking of a deblocking filter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deblocking_filter_(video)
which is typically used in the decoder for the relevant video CODEC; recent video drivers do have hardware support for this, but it's not a fundamental connection. Moreover, deblocking only helps so much.
I think that for content to be produced for online (not just as a novelty webisode but as an actual artform) people need to start thinking outside the 22 minute content 8 minute ad format for half hour blocks of television.
For example, a standard sitcom format goes like this.
Credits
Story (teaser / cold open)
Commercial
Story
Commercial
End of Story
Commercial
Tag
Credits
It would be interesting to see some A/B testing with recutting lengths of commercials for the exact same episodes with a randomised set of people and see if the net effect of how "funny" a show is is noticeable or negligible.
(sorry, just late night stream of conciousness rambling)
The way I figure it, the minimum number of people you need in any traditional production is essentially the cast and base operators (which could also be cast members if multi-skilled)
However if you go into 3D animation, this number can actually go down - to the point where you have a content production team around the size of a small startup.
The model I'm looking at could be described as a digital aniation studio, a "mini pixar" if you will, that uses open source software (Blender, Cinelerra) and homebrew motion capture (both facial and performance) to get performance across in a quick manner and using a significantly smaller team. I'm also looking at leveraging EC2 for rendering instead of investing in purchasing multiple servers for a render farm.
The model isn't scalable across the entire film/tv industry of course, but I figure it could work for a couple studios and this is what I'm working on trying to prove right now.
If you could tag your contributions with CC-Attribution licenses and have your name appear in the credits, that might be enough incentive for a lot of people to bring down production prices even more.
But I bet you can lower many of the technology costs. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there's an extraordinary amount of inefficiency there.
And/or talent would be payed with equity.
Take Pixar, It's the highest profile of the 3D animation studios and can you name any of the voice talent for WALL-E? There was no "top talent" there in any notable role, in fact, apart from one of Pixar's 4 main directors (Andrew Stanton of Finding Nemo fame) I'm pretty sure anyone would be hard pressed to name anyone of note in a major role.
Now lets look at Dreamworks Animation, Arguably number 2 (even though they are more profitable than Pixar and also have the highest grossing animation film of all time in Shrek 2...)
Apart from voice talent in their films, can you name any of the talent in the films? Its a difficult task. The talent is shared among the many people that work there.
The reality is that voice talent is the "draw card" for 3D animation and is one of the minor expenditures for any 3D film.
So let's go back to Pixar, when Pixar was first producing their films, their distribution deals with Disney had them giving up 50% of the profits for the film.... They do all the hard work and only get back 50% of the money.
On that same business model, If you figure out a way to only monetise your film 50% of the the time and not care about it being pirated (even welcoming the filesharers as pseudo distribution/marketing) - you're off to a good start.
If you start reducing the workload on your animators/modellers (using limited cast/sets, animating more with mocap, scripting "extras"... essentially adopting a sitcom format) you can get away with doing episodic content with a significantly smaller team. Keep voice acting internal (even Pixar directors do voices on their films occasionally)... you're reducing costs further.
This I think is one of the ways out to cheaper productions and since online video has been notoriously hard to monetise - its a start.
I've also got a couple other ideas on ways to continue monetising off the model I'm proposing, but yeah, there is potential there.
Cars: Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Cheech, George Carlin
Incredibles: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson
Finding Nemo: Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney,
Monsters, Inc.: John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi
I don't know why you think animation means you don't need actors.
And your 'argument' on WALL-E is HUGELY flawed: Ben Burtt (who 'voiced' WALL-E) is literally the go-to guy when you need incredible sound effects. Not only would that movie have failed without him, he got the job because he's THE best sound fx guy in the business. For something like WALL-E, you need even more exacting quality, not less. And the few voices they did have went to John Ratzenberger (of "Cheers" fame: he has 95 acing credits on IMDB), Kathy Najimy, and Sigourney Weaver.
Making good content requires good content producers. I'm not trying to discourage you: there are good people out there. But you seem to be saying that since its animation, you can have lower standards. No: you need higher ones.
That means they have many, many models, sets, textures etc that go into the production of any film, which of course increase your cost of production considerably. That's just a matter of fact.
What I have been saying is that if you take a different view, don't start out by trying to swing for the fences (you can always scale up later), essentially limit some of these choices you could probably get away with a smaller team in the beginning.
For example, lets move away from films for a second and talk about sitcoms. One of my favourite is Frasier.
Frasier has (for the most part) a very limited series of sets and characters. You have your 5 main characters, your 6 occasional supporting characters and for the most part these back and forths take place in 4 locations...
That's about 6 seasons of entertainment there for a sitcom, or about < 1 minute of Pixar animation.
That's really the kind of difference we're talking about in terms of cost of production.
Are you saying that you can produce 6 seasons of Frasier with the cost of 1 minute of Pixar animation? Sounds doubtful.
You seem to be talking about growing an animation studio from the ground up.
Everything has to start somewhere, but the kind of content you could put out with minimal costs might not attract many viewers, which would make it difficult to grow.
Not cost - number of artifacts within a that timeframe over several shots.
Then again, Let's run some numbers to talk about cost.
WALL-E cost $120 million for 98 minutes, Ratatouille cost $150 million for 111 minutes, so you could infer that Pixar animation costs about $1.3 million per minute (roughly) and each production takes around 3-4 years to make.
The Blender "peach" team produced 10 minutes of animation (Big Buck Bunny) in 3 months with 9 people from concept to delivery using all open source software. (There were only 6 people primarily involved in the production of the animation itself, 2 were actively developing Blender as software and 1 did the music)
Big Buck Bunny - http://www.vimeo.com/1084537
Once all the meshes, sets etc are initially created, it all boils down to production of scripts, storyboarding and then animating more content based off artifacts you've already produced.
Remember, I'm talking a sitcom format, that is you artificially limit yourself with numbers of characters and locations (which includes lighting etc) which allows you to spend more time on animation instead of producing more sets/figures.
In fact, once everything is set up, animation is one of the shortest segments of any film animation project (dont believe me? check Dreamworks Animation's general timeline breakdown from their most recent annual report, page 21, link follows)
http://ir.dreamworksanimation.com/dwa/export/system/modules/...
So while no, you might not get a full 6 seasons, you could probably do several seasons for the cost of 1 minute of Pixar production.
You seem to be talking about growing an animation studio from the ground up.
Thats exactly what I'm talking about.
The model I've been more or less discussing throughout this thread is for a startup I'll be working on soon, maybe even applying to YC with in the next round of funding.
PG says, make something people want - this year is turning out to be the biggest year on record for Hollywood in terms of ticket sales, people spend more time in front of their TV's now than 5 years ago and now they also spend more time online (and TV/film piracy is on the rise)
Fact is - people want to be entertained...
I'm not saying it doesn't - it obviously does.. what I'm saying is that not all animation has to be film scale, nor does it have to have proper actors as draw cards for voice talent.
My argument was that WALL-E was a smash hit and the use of big name actors as voice talent to sell the film wasn't part of the equation.
You completely missed the point.
But you seem to be saying that since its animation, you can have lower standards. No: you need higher ones.
No, I'm not saying that at all - Going up against a studio like Pixar/Disney or Dreamworks Animations thats entirely the case, but there are plenty of films out there that you don't even hear about that are plenty profitable - if you were to target the film industry that is.
You just don't need to scale it up (in terms of budget) for it to work, that's my whole argument
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.
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:
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.
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.
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' comment is all over this.
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.