Howard Owens has been arguing with what seems to be the entire videography field over this for too long.

Having worked in the TV news business and in newspaper Web sites, I can say without a doubt that 1 hour production time is well within reason for most videos. If a TV photographer can’t work under that kind of pressure, they’re in the wrong business. I’ve seen photogs edit great VO-SOTs (Voice Over to Sound On Tape, usually a talking head, for the uninitiated)–with linear bays, no less!–in under 10 minutes.

Multitasking skills, solid understanding of shooting basics and good division of labor (where possible) are key to kicking out quality vids fast. Newspapers just aren’t prepared for this quite yet. Thankfully, we’re starting to get there.

It all comes down to the economics of the medium.

Documentary film is meant for larger scale audiences. With TV, everybody watching is going to see that long, well-produced packaged. On the Web, not everybody hitting the homepage cares about that well-crafted 2:30 package on whatever. They just won’t click on it. Because they don’t care or something else on the site interests them more and their time is limited.

You might get a few hundred views from interested people in a day and then that video falls into oblivion. News has a pretty short shelf life.

Why spend 5 hours on one video, when you can spend 5 hours on 5 videos to get a thousand or more page views (a few hundred times 5+) and possibly increase time on site (assuming some users might watch more than just one video)? Put more “crap” on the Web.

This nonsense about the “craft” is infuriating. We’re not in a storytelling business (if we were our stories wouldn’t be so overwhelmingly boring; Very few newspapers write terribly compelling long form pieces with any regularity. And yes I know that statement will piss people off–deal with it. I consistently read better articles in my wife’s copy of Glamour than most of the stuff the newspapers I read put out every year). We’re here to disseminate information to an audience. Who. What. Where. When. Why.

Which suggests we should strive to better understand our audience.

We in the news business get so hung up with ourselves we usually forget about what our audience actually wants. We need to stop being so high and mighty.

In live TV, I’d go home pissed about a horrible show. Everything went wrong in production. Supers were mixed up, cues were late or missed, the guy on the audio board was asleep at the wheel and the studio camera crew couldn’t properly frame up shots. And I’d get home, fuming. I’d start to rant to my wife or my in-laws or my friends about everything and rarely, very rarely did they ever notice these details that I thought ruined everything. They were still able to parse the info they needed. They didn’t have the same notions about my product as I did.

And this is our problem. A good story might come up and we won’t cover it because we’ve covered a similar story earlier, assuming everybody else in the world already knows about it. Christ. What is wrong with that? Anyone who has ever looked at Web traffic data can tell you, rolling their eyes no less, that it’s simply not true. Nobody, except for a few people at the paper reads every story. Nobody!

Getting back to Web video. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to do great videos. We certainly shouldn’t do video for the sake of doing video.

But, we should stop worrying about the little details. Who cares if the edit isn’t quite tight enough or the audio is a bit too hot? We do. But we care too much! Just ask yourself if the video and any accompanying package gives the audience what they need. Then move on to the next story.

There’s this weird tradition in news media that if we don’t produce the best possible craft we can, we’ll lose our readers. Look at it like this: First, we’re already losing readers. Second, there are people in your audience that care about higher quality and people that don’t.

First, target the group that will make you more money, then, when you’ve nailed that model down, go after the other group. Look for tangible results. Because honestly, that’s what your advertisers are looking for.

While intangibles like “reputation” and “preferred source” and “best” are nice for marketing yourself to clients or possible new readers, they’re not as valuable in the long tail market.

People want what they want. Brand hardly matters. Or rather, information is brand.

Clown Co finally has a name–and it sucks.

Don’t know what Clown Co is? It’s the much hyped, poorly executed online video venture from News Corp. and NBCU that was supposed to take on YouTube and other video sites. Bloggers and jokers in the media world dubbed the partnership ClownCo because they announced said partnership long before they had even hired anyone to execute it.

So, let’s get back to the shitty name, Hulu.com. Terry Heaton put it best:

This portal has been so hyped as God’s gift to online video that any name they came up with would likely have bombed, especially with the tech community — which includes the people who’ve written the book on online video without the “help” of the networks or studios. Old media just doesn’t get that new media isn’t created in a board room with fancy consultants (oh shit, I’m a consultant!), because the results are usually just varnished horse crap. Hulu? The first thing people did was research the word in various languages, and the meanings are almost too funny to believe. In Indonesian, it means “butt.” In Swahili, “cease and desist.”

Rather ironically, these were the reasons behind the name, according to Hulu.com CEO Jason Kilar:

Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premier content when, where and how you want it.

I also have to agree with Heaton and the commenters at Lost Remote that beyond thinking up a name with hilarious translations (have I mentioned yet how much I hate made up Internet names like flickr, twitter, tumblr, blogosphere, etc.?), a meatier list of partners would have been killer. Neither ABC nor CBS wanted to stick with the idea. CBS has its own InnerTube, and ABC is building video players for their affiliate sites.

All that said, I signed up for the private beta of the site, coming in October. Here’s hoping it doesn’t suck. We’ll know more if and when I get that invite. I hope Hulu.com isn’t as awful an experience as the Joost beta.

To be honest, News Corp. and NBCU own many of the television shows I love (and pay for through iTunes and on DVD, sometimes twice over). I think it will be a hit, despite the har-hars all over the tech and media blogs today.

Lorne Michaels: “I think that YouTube is great, because if you do something like ‘Dick in a Box,’ someone in Pakistan can see it.”
(New York Observer).

Perhaps no other network show has gotten more out of the free video-sharing Web site than Saturday Night Live. Indeed, at the very moment the long-running program seems to be emerging from a years-long slump, producing sketches—not just lip-synch bloopers—that people actually want to share, discuss, and watch again and again, YouTube has been there, doing more to re-establish the show’s cultural relevance than any honcho at NBC.

If you have never seen the skit before, you can watch it in my video section here.

I am…underwhelmed.

The idea of Joost fascinates me. But the execution of the service drives me nuts. I don’t like that it takes over my screen. I don’t really like the content to choose from…yet.

I also have serious questions about how Joost will offer local news.

Network affliates are already up-in-arms about their networks subverting the affiliate model and giving away primetime programing away via iTunes or their own sites (ABC has a player for affiliate Web sites, so you if you missed LOST, you might be able to watch it on your local ABC station Web site). Though, online revenue share for TV stations is probably worse off than newspaper revenue share.

It will be interesting to see how local TV stations will handle the disruption caused by the Web.

Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube got me thinking about what would happen if YouTube suddenly (and magically) pulled all of the copyright infringing works overnight, forever.

Would you be left with something like this?