JoshPaul

With my recent post about HD, I’ve been giving it a little more thought. Although I truly enjoy the HD image, I don’t see how it is going to survive, at least in broadcast. Here’s why:

The television industry is currently undergoing a transformation, attempting to move forward with HD, while trying to embrace online video distribution (and even mobile distribution). By doing so, they are offering more opportunity for big named advertisers to safely test the waters of online video advertising with proven entities. Therefore, they are moving ad dollars that could have been spent on broadcast to the online world.

This is causing production budgets to get smaller (Why do you think there’s so much reality tv on? It’s cheap and brings in respectible ratings.) HD content is more expensive to produce. From the cameras to the personnel, and even the tape stock, it just costs more. So how do you produce HD content with less money?

The vast majority of my clients in the tv industry are shooting DVCPRO at 50Mbit/s. In fact, it’s been difficult to locate DVCPRO decks in LA for rental because of its popularity for aquisition. DVCPRO 50 is not HD. That means, right now, shows that are in production are not shooting HD. Therefore, there’s not a lot of footage available in HD which can only lead to a limited selection of shows for broadcast in HD.

Meanwhile, online video is exploding, and production quality is going up. It won’t be long until an independent production company starts its own network or cuts a deal with one of the sharing sites.

What happens in the next couple of years? Who knows. But I think the threat of video distributed via internet is going to be more of a threat than expected…time to innovate…