Bridging Media Session Four: Meet Your Monsters

Meet Your Monsters: Solving Traditional Broadcast Webmares

“The digital world is not all that scary – despite the monsters under your mainframe! This panel will focus on successful case studies in how the medium is being used effectively. The players will present new models for the future.” [Bridging Media – Session]

Panelists:

Boris Mann: Raincity Studios and Bootup Labs
Robert Ouimet: At Large Media
Mark Rocchio: StudioB Productions
Chris Mizzoni: StudioB Productions

Boris starts off with Giant Ant Media as an example – they have an audience of 800,000 on some of their videos, “how many of you would like an audience of 800,000?” …”and did they wait for funding? No.”

Another example is CommonCraft – their business is explaining technologies in plain English and they started doing their videos for free. They were such a success online that big companies came up to them to ask if they can create these types of videos for them, and that’s how they started to make money.

Why do you have to sit and wait for someone to give you hundreds of thousands of dollars? Why can’t you start off small?

Mark from StudioB speaks about broadcasters and how they’re moving toward including digital shorts within the licensing deals for shows or films. They’re moving in the right direction but aren’t getting much traction with tons of funding and a fancy web department, so his point is you simply need to get content out there ie. those digital shorts, which serve as a jump start.

Chris is the traditional print guy on the panel who talks about all the other things that come with book publication these days such as including a multimedia CD, making a website or even producing a podcast about a book that is to be released.

Robert is a CBC veteran touching on how broadcasting is a single outlet. He started out getting a $3 million budget for a project, which he follows up by saying “woo!” Boris pipes up to ask him if the “woo” was facetious like, “oh that’s not much” or “oh wow that’s a lot” because I think most of us here would get pretty darn excited about getting $3 million for a project, I know I would at least. Trying to tap into getting a major broadcaster to fund a project is simply one outlet you can deal with. “Get help, talk to people who have business, that may not be web businesses but are good business people.” … “Take ideas, forge business deals (that may not even be sexy) but get it done.”

Mark addresses this issue from a digital animation studio perspective, “we brought animation production back to Canada that hadn’t been here since He-Man.” He mentions that it’s actually cheaper to animate here than in the Philippines, however in the early stages of their studio they were extremely dependent on funding. “We’re still in that traditional world,” but they needed to take control of their own destiny and lead the company where it needed to go. Mark also praises Vancouver as a true hub and leader in digital media and animation.

Chris confirms as a writer/author that he writes when he can, he doesn’t even have a publisher anymore, but he still does it. Boris to Chris, “how can yo afford to just sit there and create content?” he’s being a little silly of course as Boris’ point is to produce, make content, and the rest follows.

A commenter in the audience says he’s seeing two approaches here: “Sell your soul to the devil,” and the “Colonel Sanders model where you live out of your car until you sell your recipe.” Although, the conversation is moving over to the Radiohead model, “pay what you can” to get something you want to get.

Give you users more experience, the whole “bonus features” and added value concept. Why do people pay for wifi at some locations? Convenience factor. Have an entrepreneurial mind set, don’t think about how you’re a starving Canadian artist waiting to be funded – asserts Boris, “make the content, make it excellent, that’s what will get you the eyeballs.” Think about alternative distribution channels as well.

Mark brings up convergence – being able to watch whatever you want to watch on any given monitor. Movies on XBox or the computer? Sure.

Monique, who used to work at Raincoast books, says they used to think about the book as just the beginning of the story, there was so much more to create and generate to connect people with the ideas surrounding it.

A final comment from the audience thanks Megan and Erica for all their hard work with today’s conference. On to the thank yous, a big one to Vera’s for lunch, and everyone else listed on the sponsor page. Miss604.com was also the official media sponsor, with these here live blogs.