If you’ve had your tech antennae up lately, you’d have noticed that Internet and portable video is popping up everywhere. The video sharing site YouTube has seen massive growth in web visitors and visit duration, drawing some 724 million web site views in June. Major networks are starting to offer full-length episodes of their programs on-line. The Apple iTunes music store now holds thousands of videos for download to its iPod Video device. And now, Google has added a specialized video search to its standard palette.
The folks at Streamingmedia.com think there’s critical mass for a mobile video explosion (but then again, they’re enthusiasts, so reduce every breathless prediction by a power of 10).
I’m not exactly sure what arts and culture organizations should be doing about it right now. But I know we should be paying attention.
Michael Klein says
The opportunity to grow a video audience is there. The object is for arts and culture organizations to imagine creating their own videos, partnering with firms such as ours, to produce video that serves their mission and audience.
Neal Spinler says
If anything, arts organizations should look at the great marketing potential these sites offer. Anyone can set up an account with Google or YouTube and post videos for free. The key word in that sentence is FREE. These sites allow you to upload your videos and then give you an html code allowing you to place it on any web site you want. The only cost to you is a small screened logo down in the corner of your video.
These are a great option for small orgs, heck, even the big ones. The videos are hosted by Google or YouTube so you are not eating up your storage space with videos. I do not believe it eats up your allowable monthly bandwidth limit either.
Assuming all copyright rules are adhered too, orgs can place samples of upcoming plays, concerts, and performances. Interviews with artists can be posted. Speeches can be viewed over and over again. Blogs can now become Vlogs. (Perhaps a video version of the Artful Manager is on its way!)
I saw many artists use YouTube and MySpace as great promotional tools for the MN Fringe Festival. By customizing a MySpace page, fringy theatre companies were able to post blogs on the rehearsal process and then on their experiences during the fringe. They YouTubed (it’s a verb now, right next to Googled) pieces of their show and placed them on their MySpace page. Some of these MySpace pages offered more usable content than some of the biggest PAC webpages.
So yes, Andrew, we should be paying attention. Patrons are expecting more when they visit our web pages. We have to figure out how to give it to them.
Jason Heath says
Using sites like YouTube will really help orchestras. The challenge is convincing the musicians to let their material go out cheap/free. The “good old days” of recording are long gone. YouTube, video downloads of concerts trhough iTunes, podcasts of live concerts–all of these tools could tremendously benefit orchestras and bring in new audience members and good press.
Alexis says
Another very significant challenge is that these sites will force organizations to think differently about how their content is used. As “pull” platforms, meaning that content is accessed by users as and when they want it, rather than being “pushed” by producers according to what they think consumers do or should want, organizations will need to think creatively about how they get users to pull their content from these sites. The beauty of these sites is that you can find an almost endless supply of what you want…and ignore what you don’t. Just posting content is not enough, organizations will need to think creatively about how they get people to choose to engage with it online. There has already been a backlash against corporate producers (P.Diddy for one) who have tried to use these sites solely as marketing platforms to sell their content.