Bencredible

I have not been posting here lately mostly because I have been trying to make Spacevidcast coverage freaking AMAZING! I think it is working out well over there, but it sure does take a lot of time. In the end, I truly believe it is all worth it, even if I basically work 24 hours a day.

Before I mention the viewership stats for STS-132, I would like to point out that it was the final scheduled launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis, so I’m sure viewership was higher because of that. For STS-131 we had 234,079 views live. I figured that we would probably get a 1/3 bump because this was the last launch of 104, maaaaybe if we were really lucky we would get 50% more views. Best case scenario would have been 400,000 views of the live launch.

On our SD/Mobile channel alone we had 692,715 views or almost 3x the number of viewers that we had for STS-131! That’s just our SD channel and does not take in to account the HD channel or any of the on-demand versions of the videos.

To put this in to perspective, around 383,000 viewers tuned in to CNN that day according to this report. In fact there is only one news network that had better ratings than we did that day, Fox News Channel with 1,065,000 viewers. So for NASA, if they want to reach people, a lot of people who are very interested in space flight, it is time that they turn to New Media and look away from the old media sources. I full well expect that by the last shuttle flight, be it STS-134 or STS-135 we will have better ratings than all of the cable news networks, including Fox News Channel.

THANK YOU to everyone who tuned in and helped make the STS-132 live coverage so amazing. I know we were syndicated on a ton of sites and had a lot of people working behind the scenes to make things happen. It doesn’t matter if you were a viewer or contributor, thank you for helping make Spacevidcast out-perform traditional television. Not by a little, but by a landslide!

Until January 2010 Spacevidcast was more of a hobby than a business. We really didn’t have any competition and we owned the space podcast marketspace (outside of NASA produced podcasts of course). If I’m being honest, since it was more of a hobby I really only brought by C+ game at best. If we couldn’t make a show, then, you know, cancel it. If it was too hard to do an event, just skip it.

On January 19th, 2010 Spacevidcast became a real company. Technically speaking we’re Spacevidcast LLC. Now it is time to bring the A game.

There will be a bit of a format change on the show coming up. We’re still going to have fun and be personable, but the live shows really won’t be news focused. That’s what the daily shows will be for. Here’s the new game plan:

• Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday produce a daily 5 minute show on space. In this show we’ll have a couple of news items, a ‘Today in Space History’ and a featured weekly app download for your computer or mobile device. These will be highly produced shows and available only on-demand.
• Thursday nights (in the US) we will have our live show. This show will be guest centric. We will bring the guest on right away and forego the news. Hey, we already did the news in the first part of the week anyhow. This will be a well produced live show that will last between 30 and 60 minutes. Post show will remain as is.
• Friday we will make the live show available on-demand.
• We will have at least 3 new articles per week. These will be any anything human space flight related.
• We will be pulling in our KSC resources (namely Jason) a lot more to help produce segments and get exclusive epic only content and interviews.

I can’t decide on the podcasts. Audio podcasts are easy to produce, but with the amount of video we will be cranking out, that will get to be a bit much. What do you guys think? Would a weekly podcast be of any value to you? If so, what would you like to see the format be?

In addition, our launch coverage (which is already the best coverage on or off the planet) is about to become even better. I won’t ruin the surprise, but lets just say some money is being invested, some graphics are being made, and no one, not even traditional broadcast, will be able to touch our content. These final 4 shuttle missions will be truly amazing, and you can only get that on Spacevidcast.com. Did I mention you can get all of that in true HD too? Yeah.

So if Spacevidcast today is just my C+ game, imagine what my A game will bring. I can say that my laptops are all crunching new video elements, we have a new system in place for content research and validation, I have a group of people helping to get us inside access the likes of which the world has never seen, oh and since we have epic now we can afford to do all this cool stuff!

Stay tuned! These changes will start happening as soon as show 3.11 with our guest Robert Pearlman. And as the weeks go by you’ll see more and more new elements get added in to the show. This week will only be a small taste, but I think you guys will all like what you see. As always we welcome comments and feedback. What do you like about the show today? What do you hate? Where can we improve? Lets make this the best video show, ever!

One thing that Spacevidcast epic is supposed to do is bring in enough income to help pay for trips to conferences. This is good for the space community because we want to bring you as much coverage of stuff as possible. The idea has been working, but since it is so new, we’re still a bit limited in what we can do.

Our goal was 20 members in the first month and then 30 new members each month after that. Well I’m happy to say that in Feb 2010 we got over 40 members! But March has slowed quite a bit, in no small part to us being busy and not pushing epic as much. Also a part of it is that many of the people who were waiting to buy epic now have it and don’t need to buy it again.

So here we are. Great start, but not enough. Both Cariann and I were able to go to SpaceUp and bring you as much awesome coverage as we could, but Spacevidcast epic simply was not big enough for us to both go to SxSW. This was the conference that I really wanted to go to, but had a hard time justifying over SpaceUp, ISDC and shuttle launches. So we opted to send Cariann all by herself while I stayed at home.

We attempted to record the Moon 2.0 panel but I’m not sure how much we were able to get. Cariann is also making a bunch of great contacts at SxSW and hopefully some of them will pan out. Spacevidcast epic is nice, but we’re not opposed to having advertising dollars in the bank too. Hey, we have grand visions for Spacevidcast and that all takes money.

So if you guys have any ideas on how we can raise more cash and get to more conferences, events and cool things that you want covered, please drop a line in the comments below. Each trip on average costs around $2,500, so keep that figure in mind. Once we hit 250 epic subscribers, we should be good to go to 1 event per month!

A little while back I wrote about the woes and troubles I was having trying to find a membership plugin for WordPress that did everything I need. Here is the list of items I was looking for:

On-site credit card processing. If a potential customer has to go out, create a PayPal or other account, enter all their info, authorize the purchase and generally jump through hoops to get your product you may have lost them already. The credit card processing should be on site (secure of course), easy to use and International.

Affiliate program. My greatest evangelists are the users who already have the product and think it is awesome! Why not allow them to help sell the product and give them a kick back of each sale they make?

E-Mail marketing. Getting the customer is one step, retaining them is another. It is important to be able to communicate with everyone as to why their membership is valuable and what they are getting out of it. It is also important to allow the members to opt-out of said e-mails if they want to. The initial sale is just part of the process, keeping them is the other part.

Coupons. If I want to have a sale on the product, or give out coupons to sites that can offer a discount if they use code ‘PROMO1′ for example, I should be able to do that too! It is a great tool for cross-promotion of my content and their content.

Detailed reporting. I need to be able to see what is working and what isn’t working. What do the sales look like. Where are they coming from? How much am I making and how much has to go back out to affiliates?

Support. Pre-sales, installation and maintenance are all important. Getting the plugin to do exactly what you want will probably require a few hoops you’ll need to jump through, so you’ll probably find yourself leaning on the support team a lot more than expected.

So what did we do in the end? When it was all said and done I actually purchased three plugins to get just the right ones to fit our needs: Suma Plugin, Wishlist Member and Digital Access Pass. The final plugin we went with was Digital Access Pass. Why? Because it does nearly everything on my features list and no other plugin comes even close!

When I originally wrote the article Digital Access Pass or DAP didn’t have a key feature which was on-site credit card processing. They now support on-site processing through Authorize.net or PayPay Payments Pro. We use Authorize.net and this is nice because I have full control over the merchant and what will be done. On the customers credit/debit card statement they won’t see ‘PayPal’ but rather ‘Spacevidcast.com’. It looks like a complete and total solution. Wishlist Member still to this day doesn’t support this feature, although their support department originally told me they did. Lame.

In addition DAP already had almost all of the other features I needed. The products and drip content are quite powerful. Far more powerful than Wishlist Member.  Suma doesn’t even have the ability to do drip products or one-off sales. E-mail marketing was already built in. Affiliates are built in and scary powerful. Issues I wouldn’t have even thought of were in place allowing the sales to be properly matched to a user no matter the scenario (check it out on their site, it is quite powerful). I have detailed reporting on what is happening with my account as soon as I log in to the admin dashboard. It was almost everything I needed.

One thing DAP is missing are coupons. I believe they are working on that though as I have seen rumblings of that on the blog.

It is worth pointing out that I tried all three. Suma was a close second. It had on-site credit card processing, support was simply amazing and the product worked well. The big problem with Suma was that it was only a recurring subscription product. It doesn’t do drip products or marketing, it doesn’t do e-mail campaigns, it doesn’t do affiliate programs and while you can hack in coupons it really doesn’t do them like you would expect.

The big plugin in the industry is Wishlist Member and going in to this project I thought it would be the product I would end up with. Boy was I wrong. Other people rant and rave about their support, but in my experience I found them to be the slowest in responding, when they did respond the answer was wrong and even after I asked for a refund I don’t think I ever got it. The product does drip products / marketing very, very poorly. Worst of all you have to go off-site, create an account with a third party and hope you don’t lose your customer in the process. No on-site credit card processing (no matter what their support team says). Wishlist does a great job of marketing themselves, but maybe if they spent a little less time making videos and a little more time adding features to keep up with DAP we would have gone down that road for Spacevidcast instead.

After a week long trial with each the clear winner was DAP. It is an evolving product and even after we launched there were new updates and great new revisions to the code. I know Suma is working on a v3 beta as well. I don’t think Wishlist Member has anything in the pipe, maybe a new video they are working on? If you’re looking for a new WordPress membership plugin check out Digital Access Pass. Don’t get sucked in by flashy marketing, really look at the products. I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I did that DAP is hands down the best WordPress Membership plugin on the Internet today.

If you want to see how we used this plugin in production hit up http://www.spacevidcast.com/epic and while you’re there… Maybe buy an epic subscription!

Wow, with the number of posts I have made recently you would assume that I made a New Years resolution to blog more. Believe it or not, I didn’t! We just have a ton of stuff going on in getting ready for Spacevidcast 3.01 which is only 5 days away from this posting! I can tell right now that we won’t be done in time. Here are a few thoughts I had while we were driving around town trying to get our act together:

I also have some shots of the gear. This is the old ProjectMix I/O and the new Fast Track Ultra next to each other:

As always comments are welcome below. I like to start each year with a bang! All new graphics, all new set, all new everything! The show itself will be the same Spacevidcast you love, just better. This year we didn’t have the long break between seasons that we had last year, so I’m just not sure how much we can get done. Of course actually being on-air is more important than graphics, so we won’t miss this next week, but it is always nice to make a well produced show.

Thoughts?

I’ve never been happy with the live set for Spacevidcast. We could go with a virtual set, but until I can do a 4:4:4 chroma key allowing even the fibers of my hair to look natural (hint: very hard and expensive) I’ll probably stick to a traditional set.

One of the things that I *hate* with the current set is that it looks so news like. We’re behind a table talking at you, not with you. Completely wrong format for this show. The community is just as much a part of the show as we are. I want it to be more informal, more fun, less news like.

My thought was that we would get a couch and a chair. I would sit in the chair and Cariann would sit in the couch. In front of us maybe a coffee table where we would put our computers and possibly a drink (I’ll take a Hendrick’s and tonic with a cucumber, thank you). To do this right I would need 3 HD cameras (problem) and would probably stop putting the guest on the plasma monitor and only have them full screen and in the double box. Cariann and I went shopping and after searching for a while determined we may want to just do two chairs and two side tables. Here’s an interesting option from Ikea:

And the side tables would be so we have something to put our computers on. Something like one of these:

OK, well the red is a bit out there and we would not do that if we got orange chairs. These also come in white.

I still have a HUGE issue with the background. Cafn8ed came up with a nifty idea of some white foam and the possibility to cover it with a graphic of sorts. I go back and forth on that one. Could do some cool things with lights, but as I think about it more and more I fear it will just end up being bland without any kick. Maybe that’s OK. Like I said, back and forth. I could also take the current HDTV and put it back behind us with a Spacevidcast animation of sorts. No idea what to do back there that won’t look cheap and cheesy while at the same time not spending a lot of money. The white sheet really doesn’t work well, just looks like a giant white bedsheet. We could go back to black and then shine something on that to give it some color. Orange chairs and orange lights on the background may look sorta cool.

Of course I fell in love with something we can’t afford. I really like these chairs, but they are $3,500 each. At that price I would get two new HD cameras rather than chairs! But they sure would look cool!

What do you guys think? Stick with the news like desk? Make it more informal and conversational? I like the general idea of what Ashton did in the video below. Nice chair, nice couch, table and interesting background (although the background needs some love still). What do you think?

Oh the pains of living in Minnesota. Of course much of the US is blanketed in snow right now, but this is nothing unusual for us. Check out the video of our 8′ C-Band dish, which is what provides everyone with Spacevidcast HD, covered in snow.

Since we installed the dish in spring we had never needed to deal with snow before. With the dish as you see it in the video I had 51% signal, which I thought was pretty good for having the dish covered that much. Alas, 51% is not enough for an image and I ended up with 0% image quality. I spend around 15 minutes shoveling off the dish (and 45 minutes trying to get dry again) to get the signal back up to 95% with 100% image quality. w00t! Of course now NASA is switching satellites on January 16th, which means I’ll need to figure out how to rotate that dish with all the snow. I’ll probably need to give our great friend PSB Satellite a call to help and make sure that who area is clear of as much snow as possible before hand. That won’t be fun because that is super-compacted, super-wet snow.

[UPDATE]: Voting is now open! You can vote for Spacevidcast on the Livestream.com site.

Exciting day for me and I think for all Spacevidcasters out there! I have wanted to get a premium account with Ustream.tv (watershed) or LiveStream.com but simply could not afford it on Spacevidcast’s budget of $0.00. Earlier this month LiveStream announced a contest to win a free premium account (I assume the small one). The contest was simple: using LiveStream’s new channel design features, create a new channel look that would wow the judges. I had a couple of weeks to make this happen, but as usual waited until the 11th hour and at the last minute submitted something. I actually liked what we submitted but had no idea if it would actually make it. The contest ended on December 14th and then… nothing. Not a peep.

Earlier today I got an e-mail from LiveStream that said,

“Nice work. Out of hundreds of page designs, yours was one of the ten best. Voting starts tonight and ends Monday, Dec 28th at 11:30 pm. Your Channel will be featured as a finalist in our next newsletter as well as on the Livestream website. Good luck.”

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet! I actually had no idea this was a two stage process, but at least we passed the first stage. I just figured they would pick a bunch of designs and go from there. Now we need to win stage 2! Later tonight LiveStream will post the content on their website where users can vote (I assume there will be a blog entry). I would be greatly appreciative if you would vote for the Spacevidcast design to help me get in with a premium account as a great way to start 2010.

Why should you care? Because a LiveStream premium account can have all those annoying ads removed! That’s right, no more pre-rolls, no more overlays! I can opt to add them back in if I want to make some cash for SVC, but this is a fantastic way to get epic subscribers a channel without any ads!

Now I just need ToDoCast.tv to have a similar contest so I can win a free satellite broadcasting setup and free satellite air time. That would be truly awesome!

What a great way to end 2009!

Creating weekly or even daily video shows online is, well, hard. There is a lot of work that has to go in to the production. Unlike traditional television where the video just plays out of a video server and you’re done, in new media you have to compress, re-compress and compress again before you even think of distribution! I saw this message from Miles O’Brien of SpaceFlightNow‘s new show This Week in Space (TWiS) and it inspired me to give you my list of things to make your life easier. What should you do in a new media videocast? What should you avoid? And how can you get it done? This list applies to any new media show being put online and is not specific to SFN’s new show.

Don’t try and simply put a traditional TV show on the web
I wrote a long and detailed post on this here. Just remember who your audience is and more specifically when and where they will be watching your show. In many cases a lot of your viewers will be watching at work, so try and keep your shows short and under 5 minutes. This also makes it easier to distribute as you don’t have to worry about YouTube’s 10 minute limit. If you’re a REALLY HUGE provider you can subscribe for a YouTube partner channel to circumvent said limit, but it is not terribly easy to get in to this program. I do happen to have an in, so if your show needs help here, contact me.

Stick with progressive video
A traditional television signal is 480 interlaced lines of resolution. This is fine because that is what the TV sets are designed to display. A typical computer monitor is 768 progressive lines of resolution or HD. Remember this when creating your show! Avoid using SD cameras and specifically interlaced content. Stick with 480p and 720p to avoid interlaced artifacting. 1080i will end up being more like 540p by the time it hits the web, so skip that painful step and only use cameras that support progressive video. By following this simple step you’ll save time, money and frustration in trying to get your show online and looking good! Below is an old video I produced  back in 2007 that explains why this is important:

[podcast format="video" width="640" height="380"]http://s3.amazonaws.com/TEVideo/HD%20Explained/HDExplained_iPod.mp4[/podcast]

Video is 80% audio
You can have the best video show in the world, but if your audio is garbage then you have nothing. People will forgive bad video, but they won’t forgive bad audio. Over spend on audio, under spend on video. To be a true video geek you must be an audio geek first and foremost. I can’t stress enough how important not only the speaking audio is, but any music or sound effects used. Audio can completely and totally change a show from something painful to something epic and awesome.

Don’t try and chroma key, you’ll suck at it
Do you know why film uses a blue screen and video uses a green screen? Do you know the difference between 4:4:4 sampling, 4:2:2 sampling and 4:2:0 sampling? Do you know what backspill is? Do you know what a nodal compositor is? If you answered no to any of these questions then you’re not going to get a good chroma key when you try and make your video. A bad key can take away from the video and distract from the information at hand. It is time consuming and unless you can do it right looks like bad community access TV. You’ll be tempted to do a chroma key because you’ll think virtual sets are cool or you want to show off how advanced you are. Avoid the temptation! If you think you have what it takes to do a good chroma key, watch the video below. If you have that gear and can pull it off, go for it.

[podcast format="video" width="640" height="380"]http://www.bencredible.com/video/roadto1080p.mov[/podcast]

Time to market matters
Once you have shot, produced and edited your show… Well, you’re about 1/2 way done. The next thing you need to do is compress. The time it takes to compress your video matters as it can be a very, very long process. Personally I use a bunch of programs and devices to make this happen. One of them is a great device by Elgato systems called the Turbo.264 HD. This little USB stick will radically speed up the amount of time it takes to compress your video. The down side is that the video quality is not as high as something like my favorite compression tool Episode Pro. I like Episode because I can really get in to the guts of the CODEC and make it do what I want it to do. Since this is web video we have very little movement and the GOP can be really, really long! Another really great solution is built right in to Final Cut Pro. Compressor and QMaster are on the Final Cut Studio disc. Install QMaster services on as many Mac systems as you can on your local network and distribute the rendering load. Compressor makes some beautiful images if you’re editing right out of Final Cut Pro, but it is painfully slow. One thing I have wanted to try but have not had the time to yet is Episode Pro with a Matrox MXO2 Mini with Max. This should supply accelerated h.264 compression like the Turbo.264 HD but ties to Episode Pro so I would hopefully get the quality Episode Pro normally delivers. Could be a very powerful solution for web video!

Make multiple versions
You have no idea how your viewers are going to consume your content. This is web video, not TV! That means that a consumer can watch your content on an iPod, Zune, Apple TV, Roku, Computer, iTunes, Miro or something completely different. Make sure you make a mobile version, HD version and web version for each video, which means compressing it more than once!

Make your life easy — distribute with blip.tv
Blip.tv is a great way to upload each version of your show and distribute to multiple sources like YouTube, Vimeo, Archive.org, iTunes, Roku and others. After playing around with TubeMogul for a while I finally decided to stick with Blip.tv for our distribution partner. While they certainly have their glitches it is well worth the invested time to have a central place to distribute all my content. Grab a pro account while you’re at it, it is well worth the $$. Biggest down side that I have seen is that they have a 1GB upload limit which makes it hard to do long form content like Spacevidcast Live.

Remember to pimp out Spacevidcast.com
Whatever show you’re producing, remember to mention how awesome Spacevidcast.com is! Well, OK, maybe you don’t have to, but if you got any value from this post I would certainly appreciate a plug. We’re trying to change the world by edutaining it with human space flight, and the more people that get involved the better! My hope is that this post helps you produce better online video, and if it does the best way you can thank me is to plug our show from within your show. I know all of the Spacevidcasters out there would certainly appreciate it!

Of course if you need more information on how to make your new media production work, be it from equipment to production techniques, I am available to hire for consulting too. See the About page for more details.

The verdict
This Week in Space premiered today, and I have to say I was super excited (and a bit nervous as this show does compete with Spacevidcast). I love the work that Miles O’Brien and David Waters do so I had no doubt it would be world class. In my opinion it was a fantastic start, but I think they fell victim to a couple of the ‘do not’ tips listed above. Below is the final video they posted to Vimeo. Based on the tips above, do you think some of those items may have helped a bit, or am I just full of myself? You tell me in the comments! No matter what the case, it is FANTASTIC that other new media outlets are starting to come online to talk about space flight. With traditional media dropping the ball, space advocates can use all the help we can get! Competition aside, this is a badly needed show and I hope we’ll start to see even more great content coming out soon! I also hope that we kill ‘em in the viewer count, but that’s the competitive side in me that I’m not supposed to talk about.

I recently heard something along the lines of, “Internet television and traditional television are the same thing, but with a different pipe.” This caught me a bit off guard as I have never viewed Internet video and television to really be the same thing. There are a few reasons why video produced for your television is and should be very, very different than video produced for the Internet.  Not only does this change how we view our content, but it also changes how we, as content creators, monetize. Allow me to explain.

The Medium Matters
When compared to television, Internet video has much more constrained bandwidth. This means that fast moving pictures, large and beautiful frames and motion in general will get squashed by the compression for the Internet. The end result is a smaller picture, lower frame rates and a much blockier image than what you would get on TV. In addition every bit matters online. If you have 10,000 people watching a television broadcast there is no more load on the TV tower than if 5 people were watching. In fact TV broadcasts can scale to an indefinite amount so long as everyone is within range of the tower. Internet video on the other hand has to serve a unique stream to each viewer which means that 5 people watching a video is 5x harder than 1 person watching a video. 10,000 people watching takes 10,000x more bandwidth, more server power and more resources than is 1 person is watching. However, unlike television the viewer of my Internet content can be just about anywhere in the world. There is no need to be within range of a powerful and expensive broadcasting antennae.

While both TV and the Internet are using digital information to transmit the data, that’s about where the similarity ends. Not only can a TV station broadcast to more users easier (although with a much smaller footprint), they also have a lot more bandwidth to work with. Today Spacevidcast targets around 1Mbps for our 720p video, which is about as large as we can make it before users stop being able to see it due to Internet congestion. Television on the other hand has around 20x more available bandwidth. To this end they can simply push out a better picture and not have to worry if the end user will have a fast enough computer, a fast enough connection or the proper plugins installed.

All of this technical stuff adds up to a difference in how the content is produced. Internet content generally allots for the smaller distribution pipe whereas TV does not. This directly impacts what the video looks like, how many shots are moving, etc., etc. The very feel of Internet video is completely different than that of traditional TV.

The Mindset Matters
I refer to television content as ‘lean back’ or sometimes ‘brain off’ content. That is to say television is not a participatory event. You watch television to be entertained, not to interact. You will generally lean back in your chair, turn off your brain and relax. There is nothing wrong with this (so long as it is done in moderation) but it is very different than what you would do on a computer.

A computer and more specifically the Internet is a very different mindset. This is what I call ‘lean forward’ or ‘brain on’ content. You generally use your computer to accomplish a task. You’re there to look something up, engage with someone, chat on Facebook, Tweet, or actively do something. You’re leaning forward, typing on your keyboard and using your brain. What you’re looking to do on your computer is very different than what you’re looking to do with your Television.

What this all means
When you combine the medium and the mindset you get a very different picture of how video works online vs offline. Online videos are often short and creative (or at least viral) because many of them are watched at work during a few minutes of downtime before the user has to go back off to make money (read: stop screwing around on YouTube). When that same person gets home they are not looking to search for a bunch of clips, create a playlist and watch TV that way. Rather, that user would like the content to be sent to them in longer chunks so they can sit back and relax. The content is very, very different, the mindset is very, very different.

So what then of Spacevidcast, TWiT and other long form shows on the Internet? These shows seem to fly in the face of this entire post. TWiT is a very successful radio podcast turned videocast. You’ll note that even Leo states that today the Podcast portion is where the money is all made but it is slowly moving to video. Spacevidcast Live is an hour long video show, far too long to watch at work. What gives?

This is where understanding that the Internet is not just another pipe is critical. Spacevidcast is a live, interactive and worldwide show. We won’t have the viewership of traditional TV because of technology limitations as well as the fact that we’re a more focused niche. We will be available to anyone on the planet that has an Internet connection and flash plugin. Traditional television won’t be able to easily accomplish this and certainly can’t accomplish it at the low price point we’re able to do Spacevidcast at. If we just look at Spacevidcast as another TV show that will use traditional advertising to fund everything, then we’re already dead. We are not traditional TV. Someday you may find us on TV, but it may be a slightly different beast than what you see today. What makes us different, unique and better than traditional television is our ability to do real time stories, streamed around the world, with audience interaction that can all be viewed on-demand at any time of the viewers liking. None of these things can be done with traditional television.

You’ll note that Spacevidcast really has 3 different shows: Live, Daily and Podcast. Each one serves a purpose. Live is a long form show that is fully interactive with interviews, community involvement and launch events (dare I say some of the best launch coverage in the world). Daily is a 2 to 5 minute clip designed to allow you to get your fix of space at work via YouTube. Podcasts are designed to let you listen in your car, while you’re working out or whenever you’re on the go and can’t sit to watch but can listen. We know what the Internet allows for and have created a show that fits each category. Something you simply won’t see traditional media doing. And just as the Internet is not just another form of TV, it also is not going to make money the same way as traditional television.

Monetization
Either make money or the show will die. Sounds harsh, but an Internet show can be self funded for only so long. The problem is that traditional advertising as seen on TV is not really working on the Internet. I can point to maybe 5 shows online that have been able to successfully bring this ad supported model over. The problem isn’t just the Internet but a shift in mentality when TiVo was introduced. Users are used to being able to fast forward through ads and don’t have the patience to sit through them much anymore. For traditional TV it is no problem since that is really hard to measure. For Internet TV we can see exactly how many people viewed the ad, how many skipped it and how many converted to sales. This is both a blessing and a curse! Great for the advertiser, terrible for the ad agency selling the ad. Alas it is also bad for shows like Spacevidcast that have a very tech savvy audience who have become immune to online ads. Add in that the Internet shows generally have a much, much smaller viewer base and, well, you don’t have a winning recipe.

So what is the solution? Oh how I wish I knew. I would be worth billions! In the end I think it is understanding that these mediums, while both use moving visuals, are inherently different. What works on one may not work on the other. Hulu looks to be suffering pretty badly this last year whereas TWiT is doing fantastic! People are not afraid to pay for their content. Apple has this figured out with iTunes. I believe that the future of online media won’t be one outlet like advertising but rather many outlets. A little bit of ad revenue, a lot more subscribers to a freemium option (in our case Spacevidcast epic), merchandise sales and even things that have not been thought up yet! The key here isn’t that advertising online won’t work. In fact it will, just not to the levels we had seen before. The point to take home is that advertising is just one small piece of the much larger monetization puzzle.

Crossovers
Generally you don’t see radio on TV, but there are a few exceptions. Howard Stern is one of them. In much the same way, there are Television to Internet crossovers as well. These are the exception to the rule and as of yet are generally not as successful.

Advertising and older methods of monetization will cross over as well. The irony of all this is that TWiT is an advertising based show that has been doing so well that the only paycheck Leo will take home is that of donations from the community. Lets not forget that TWiT is the ultimate crossover… A radio show on the Internet in the form of video. Makes my head spin a bit. But TWiT is one of the 5 shows I can count that are really making the traditional model work. I have a feeling that new models will also be introduced in TWiT and eventually could even replace the ad revenue they see today. Only time will tell.

The best Internet shows seem to be those where the talent came from a traditional media spot and already had a following. TWiT is a great example of that and I’m pretty sure This Week in Space will be another. These are brilliant people who are leveraging their own personal brand to gain market share on the Internet. It seems to work well, but these people are also a finite resource. Miles O’Brien and Leo Laporte are, in my opinion, the diamonds in the rough. Eventually we will run out of these personalities and we’ll all have to build our online shows from scratch. I am all too familiar with this process through Spacevidcast. It is emotional, irritating, expensive and insanely fun.

Conclusion
So why write this mini novel about TV vs Internet video? On the last epicsode of Spacevidcast during post show we debated the chat room being burned on the screen. A long portion of that debate revolved around the idea that it may scare advertisers off in the future. In traditional television it would. Some day we’ll grow past the chat room and we simply won’t be able to have it on the screen anymore, the text will scroll by so fast it won’t be useful at all. Until then, building our show around what advertisers would want will be the instant death of Spacevidcast, and if you have an Internet show, then the death of your show too!  Advertising revenue will be one of many different areas that money will come in. Don’t be afraid to be true to your community. Work and build a product that is right for them, not designed around your (yet to be) advertisers and what they want. Once you have that, then money will come in via many different avenues. I do believe epic will work without the need for advertisers. I also think we’ll bring on advertisers as soon as it makes sense. We will do many things, but we won’t change the show, our Internet show, to do what would work on Television. The medium matters, the medium changes things and Internet TV is nothing like traditional Television. For better or for worse.

Be true to your show, your community and your passion. The rest will fall in to place.