Has YouTube changed the face of business video?
22/07/09 13:38 Filed in: Work | Production
I've been talking to quite a few people lately about how business people look upon the opportunities afforded by the rise in popularity of YouTube, and the findings (if that's what you can call them) are quite intriguing.
Back in the old days - when "shooting video" involved large 3-tube cameras recording onto portable video tape recorders the size of your average home extension - we were designing pieces of communication that ould be distributed onto strange lumps of plastic called VHS tapes. These tapes had to sent out to customers, trainees, partner organisations and operating companies before they could view them, an action that involved a thing called a VHS player. Not everyone had VHS players in the early days either.
Back in the old days - when "shooting video" involved large 3-tube cameras recording onto portable video tape recorders the size of your average home extension - we were designing pieces of communication that ould be distributed onto strange lumps of plastic called VHS tapes. These tapes had to sent out to customers, trainees, partner organisations and operating companies before they could view them, an action that involved a thing called a VHS player. Not everyone had VHS players in the early days either.
What's worse is that the cost of production was huge by today's standards. In the early/mid 80s we were looking at a ball-park commissioning cost of something in the region of £1,000 per minute of finished screen time for professional standard production. How things change.
These days - thanks to unprecedented changes in technology and the rise of broadband internet as the primary distribution medium worldwide - we can shoot, edit and disseminate high definition video at extremely low cost and even share it with others on YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Motion Box, Blip, et all., for next to nothing. In short, that means that anybody can do it for virtually nothing.
That's the good news. The bad news (if we can put it in such dramatic terms) is that there's no automatic link between high technical and high creative quality. Look at the vast majority of home-made clips on YouTube and what you see is the same dreary quality made by people who haven't taken a second to consider what they're doing, why they're doing it and who their target market actually is.
In contrast, if you're a small business owner or even someone working in a larger corporate body who's charged with improving communications through the use of both video and social networking sites in general, you can't afford to get it wrong.
Any video you upload that's associated with your organisation (even if you're a self-employed one-person-band) is representative of you or your organisation. That's why you have to get it right.
Acquiring the gear to shoot, edit and upload video of a high standard is now within everyone's grasp - but will its use be effective?
Get in touch. I can help.