My opinions, for the one thing Im not short of is opinions: Training videos that are useful to a niche are one of the more likely sorts of videos that some people will pay for.
I did not like the example prices you gave at all. Depending on the subject matter, training dvds and suchlike sometimes command a high price tag, and different niche's will have their own ideas about how much their stuff is worth, but I dont know as the internet customer will bite at prices that may not compare well in terms of cost/minute compared to dvd. I think the subscription model is more of a winner, but again it depends on the niche in question. And it works best if there is a fairly prolific quantity of new material added on a regular basis. When I think of multiple people & shows collaborating, a subscription model also makes sense to me, if it adds enough value & quantity of material to make a viewer more likely to bite. Collaboration has a number of big hurdles to overcome, such as all the issues that can make human collaboration in general quite tricky (clash of ego's, who is in control, differences of opinion, viewing others in the same niche as competition, etc etc). Then there are the technical issues, and also an apparent lack of large numbers of people with both the passion for the niche and the video skills, and the time, to pull this sort of thing off. This stuff can be overcome but it goes part of the way to explaining why we havent seen more of this sort of thing thus far. Whether its because of economic woetime, or issues of future sustainability of our ways of life, local and community sounds like an important part of the future. The internet, and video, will surely figure into this in important ways, but I can hardly begin to guess how it may turn out or exactly what form it will take. Still there are some possible scenarios where it doesnt figure into things much at all, never happens, where other forces lead us down a very different path. So far I have not gotten a sense that videoblogging & other forms of video on the internet have opened up many lucrative opportuinities for many people. Those who make it through traditional mass media are still the vast majority, and in honesty I havent seen a video for years that made me think different or that there was about to be a big change. The long tail has made me a tad more hopeful about humanity but has massively failed to live up to the hype so far, in almost every respect. Cheers Steve Elbows
