Build a niche video site and take back online video

Steve Safran May 13th, 2007

“You would think the one place video could win online would be in video.” I usually don’t quote myself, but it’s a line I use in my talks and I wanted to repurpose it here. And why not? There is a way to use your archives to start making money online. So far the TV stations have ignored it. And that’s one reason why the local TV stations have lost vast amounts of money, both real and in opportunity. There’s one more chance, and once again it requires one simple act: let video be video.

What does every successful online site have in common? It’s built to its own medium. Newspapers tried to force their old model online. It didn’t work. Once they shifted to embrace an online model, they turned a corner.

Radio is succeeding online, too. Yes, a substantial amount of that is due to rebroadcasting its on-air product. But that’s fine – it works. Radio ad sales people are trained to sell local ads in the hundreds and low thousands of dollars. They don’t turn up their noses at these buys. The TV model online hasn’t worked, but we keep doing it. We keep looking at the website as an expense, not an investment.

So where there was a void, plenty of people saw opportunity. As the pipes grew bigger, they could support video. The demand grew. However, the demand was not for the same stories people saw on the local news. The demand, as it turned out, was for thousands of different stories. The TV stations were no longer in charge. People wanted more choices than the five or six stories the stations could pump out. They wanted deep archives. And they sure as hell didn’t want someone telling them “no – that’s not a story that’s good for you – here, watch this instead.”

Eddie Izzard, the English comedian, jokes that the British lost an entire empire by saying “Really?” and “Surely not!” Local TV did the same. As people turned to YouTube, local TV said “Surely that’s not high quality video.” As people began to upload their own content to budding local portals, local TV said “Really? They could be sued!”

So local television is caught in a classic dilemma: it won’t invest in the web until the web makes money, and the web won’t make money until the station invests.

There is no business that works this way: “Nobody start buying office space until we’re profitable. We can have one or two employees, but that’s it!”

We’re accused here at Lost Remote of being Chicken Little and crying “The sky is falling.” No more. The sky fell. Local TV news ratings are crashing. People are spending their time doing other things with their eyeballs. The networks are going around the locals. Look – on the ground – it’s the sky.

There is one last opportunity: niche broadband video channels.

Broadband video is here. Joost has proven the model. Brightcove is signing partners every day. Video is ruling the pipes. And this is worth mentioning: the ad rates beat the holy hell out of buttons and banners.

Local TV stations have archives full of content that are waiting to populate a local niche broadband site. Imagine starting a local health site with every health piece you’ve done for the past five years. There are probably a few hospitals that would support that. How about owning the business video space in your town? Or having the video destination for entertainment, with a blog attached that highlights events that night?

Martha Stewart recently relaunched her site with 700 archive videos. The darn things were already there, just waiting to be used. Bob Vila did the same. You have the content. People want it. They want more than the 5-6 videos a day you put up and then take down. They want programming.

The other marvelous opportunity in all of this? You charge more for advertising. This is no longer a CPM advertising play. This is a sponsorship play. You’re going to a hospital and telling them they can sponsor the video destination for hundreds of health stories, and you’ll throw in the hospital’s videos too. You tell me what that’s worth. More than a $30 CPM, for starters.

You have pro content for which there is demand. It’s sitting on your shelf. It requires time to encode and turn into a niche broadband video site. It requires the will to think of it as its own site and not as a brand extension. It’s not WXXX.com/health/local/broadband/. It’s cityhealth.com.

You can’t stop there, but it’s a start. You need to bring in content from the community. You need to turn to the audience for ideas in each of the categories. You need to change the dialogue in each of these niches from one-way to two-way. You can keep the brand-extension news site. Think of niche broadband video sites as the programming that fills up the rest of your programming day.

Local TV can win in video if it wants to. It has the content, the staff and the archives. It only needs to choose to win. Or it can keep looking at successful sites and saying “Really? Surely not.”