It is no secret that the porn industry has used the internet well. They had the best business model for years and sales of DVD's soared. But now the porn industry is hitting the wall - the wall is that Content wants to be Free and will trend to free. So any TV/video business model that requires the viewer to pay or wait for content will die.
Conde Nast are running an outstanding item on this here. The Tipping Point is one internet site. The You Tube of Porn - You Porn.
As its name suggests, YouPorn lets users upload and watch a virtually unlimited selection of hardcore sex videos for free. The user-generated clips on YouPorn—like those on YouTube, the site it mimics—range from the grainiest amateur footage to the slickest professional product.
Also, like YouTube, the site has far more traffic than income. Just nine months after going live, in September 2006, YouPorn was on pace to log about 15 million unique visitors in May, Jones told the Vivid executives, and its audience was growing at a rate of 37.5 percent a month.
Today, YouPorn is the No. 1 adult site in the world; Vivid.com, a pay site, is ranked 5,061. According to Alexa, a website-ranking company, YouPorn’s overall rank is higher than CNN.com (84), About.com (114), and Weather.com (195). (Those numbers are averages for the three-month period from mid-June to mid-September.
Public TV still hasn't got to the point where Porn was until the recent collapse in the Porn Paid Model. If you want to watch say a new Nova program - you may be lucky in a month or so to catch it online at this portal. But there is no central repository for PBS prime time content. Often you have to go to a PBS ot a Station stores and pay a lot of money for a DVD.
Oh but our material is not like Porn and it is hard to find online you might say. You are wrong. Great material is available online and it gets easier to find everyday. All it needs is for an enterprising person to:
- Focus on a niche - the more nichey/Long Tail the better
- Make it easy to find
- Add value to the item
As an experiment I have set up an alpha site I called Rob's War Stories - I really enjoy war documentaries. Every week masses of great new material in this niche comes online line. I watch very little else now.
There is a mass of material for instance on Opera on You Tube - it only needs an enthusiast to make a site out of the material and they would have a TV channel.
There is a new Kids channel just launched on these lines called Bunny Ears. They reuse older material from all over the world and through all of TV time. It is easy to use and there is a ton of added value. Please have a look - I am impressed.
So what to do?
Here is Rob's master plan for PBS and the PBS family.
Set up a master site for PBS and for all the major producers such as WGBH and Oregon. Operate an iTunes model. It would be pay but not much. The buyer has to enter their station in the buying process and the revenue is split between the station, PBS and the Producer.
The master site would make it very easy to find material and for the viewer to create in effect their own channel. The site would have community channels attached to the material - for instance IPTV have a great Quilting Show - have a sewing circle attached. Have forums attached to Bill Moyers that Bill joins. Have local forums - so all those that love Masterpiece Theatre in St Louis can have meetups in St Louis - maybe even at KETC?
The PBS strategic plan tells me that all these things are under consideration. Why not try it?????
