Your Own TV Channel?
by Rob Paterson
Here is a new experimental site of mine. Rob’s War Stories. My purpose is to find out how to draw on the almost infinite amount of information on the web and see if creating context in a niche might help.
I am a huge fan of the history of war - my poor wife!! - I have found that YouTube has a ton of great material and of course there are all the books to be read and all the articles to be read. Much of my recent leisure time has been spent watching and surfing. It is very time consuming and I wondered what it would be like to find a War Web Channel that had a personal view and that could put much of the disparate material together and in context.
So this in 3 posts is my first step.
The larger issue for me is how my clients in Public TV will handle a video world where the content is free and is easily found on the web. How will they find value. So linked into this is our work on The War and how we are collecting material from our viewers on their war stories.
KETC will have over 50 6 minute epics by the launch of the Burns series in September and they plan to make these stories and these men and women the centre of their pledge week then. Here is the Living St Louis Team with their 9 minute epic of the local hero Omar Bradley - they can fill 9 minutes like no one else can.
WOSU is working with the other Ohio PBS stations on collecting and playing back their own stories as well. Here is Paul Harris talking about his experience as he entered the previous all white workforce. We take it for granted today - then it was a novelty and he had to prove that he too was a man like all others.
Somewhere here is the future of TV I think - rather than the networks - I think that mavens will create their own channels. The more niche the better.
What do you think of this?
