An interesting television show was on the other night on ABC. I found it interesting because it was a great example of TV trying to survive in the face of streaming video...I guess they see things like YouTube and Metacafe as competition.
The show is called icaught and it basically rehashes everything you'cve already seen online.Maybe it's just another cheap attempt to grab ratings...it's easy to run a teaser of guys crashing bikes or animals going nuts to draw in viewers.
But they have an added advantage: A big budget.
For example, they took a now-famous video, which coincidentally is referenced on my friend Ned's blog and gathered together those involved for interviews. I was torn. I mean, the video itself is what YouTube is all about..the raw, real world thrown out there in ever increasing numbers of videos. However, the folks at ABC got the guy who took the video(turns out he barely knows how to work his camera) and another guy who DIDN'T film it,but posted a copy he received on YouTube for a friend to see. They can pay to get all those involved together and "explain" it all to you.
I'm still not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, i-caught is just shameless copycatting by a powerful network, masquerading as, yes, NEWS.
On the other hand, it is interesting to get some back-story on the stuff you see.
Ultimately, I have to give it a thumbs down. The cheesy voice-overs and unnecessary editing(gotta save time for commercials) and the whole bandwagon mentality turns me off of it.
They should stick with what they're good at when it comes to videos: People getting hit in the crotch.
PS I might watch if they get Gary Brolsma on.
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2 comments:
You bet those big networks are scared of YouTube. But I think this is all part of working out a new video ecosystem. Ultimately almost all true novelty will be sourced by YouTube-like sites. But when the money gets real and it's clear something is a hit, the networks can do stuff that, as you point out, most of us can't or aren't interested in doing.
By the way, I just love the image of someone pitching "Numa Numa" to some network executives in a pre-YouTube world: "Okay, so there's this fat kid who lip synchs to this obscure Moldovan song. Only he's not very good at it, and he never looks at the camera, see, and, man oh man, people are gonna go wild for this! WILD!"
One other thing I neglected to mention was the main difference with the network version vs. YouTube is that you are force fed whattheychoose to air. On the web you're on your own to discover what you will...And yes, in this case no one would ever see "Numa Numa"
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