This article about grass roots television programming illustrates the perfect storm developing that has the potential to wreck the Hollywood-based entertainment corporations. Since the days of Milton Berle's live broadcasts, television content has been generated largely by Hollywood. It's been a tight knit cartel of writers, directors, producers, and production companies that have kept video content locked up pretty tightly, in large part because of the cozy relationship with the broadcast networks. Cable has been chipping away at that, but innovation in cable has meant largely following the same old model, but just doing everything as cheaply as possible.
The limitation has always been the same, whether you were delivering a television program over the air, by cable, or by satellite--you have only twenty-four hours per day per channel, so everything is a trade-off of demand versus air time.
Like nearly everything else it touches, the Internet just plain breaks that apart. On the Internet, content is not bound by the delivery mechanism, so we are seeing the end of CDs, the end of DVDs, the end of radio "channels," and the end of TV "channels." Channels were a construct based on the scarcity of bandwidth, and there is no scarcity on the Internet.
So for $1.99, you can download and watch a 45 minute video on how to barbecue a whole pig. But that's not even the interesting part. DaveTV, which is offering the video service, has a BBQ "channel" with more than 1000 video segments, just on barbecuing. Try doing that using the traditional television programming system. You can't. But the Internet makes it simple.
So here's the thing--Hollywood no longer has an edge--none at all. What about your region? Do you have some of the pieces in place to start some Internet TV video production companies? Is your town on a major fiber backbone that could be used to pump video to the rest of the country? Do you have some program assets that could be the basis of a channel like the BBQ channel?
Side note to my southwest Virginia readers: If I lived on a crooked road, I'd be pretty excited about the potential to market assets to a worldwide audience. And a major piece of the puzzle is just down the road in Tennessee. There's another piece over in Danville.
The beauty of the Internet is that it changes the math. With the Internet, you can add 2 + 2 and get 10 if you do it right. And there's a 10 not only in southwest Virginia but many more all over the country.
Of course, there is never a free lunch. To get to that 10, communities have to be willing to do things differently, and that's the real challenge, not the technology.