Content Is King With Online Video, But it's Not the Only King

When I was 5 years old in 1971, I wanted to be Speed Racer. 幼儿园后的每一天, I’d come home and watch the latest episode on UHF Channel 18 out of Milwaukee, then get together with my friends and take turns being the lead character or his mysterious, 失散多年的哥哥, 赛车.

When my first son was 5 years old in 1994, he wanted to be a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger. 像我这样的, 他会(在基本的有线电视上)看这个节目, not UHF) and then act out various storylines with his friends in the backyard when he was done.

Speed Racer and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers had little in common besides their origins in Japan and the fact that their central characters were regular guys and girls who just happened to have superpowers (or at least super driving skills).

今天, my 5-year-old son Ike has his share of super-hero fantasies -- he has been known to wear his Iron Man costume from morning until night. 但最近, his aspirations have been inspired by a kid just 2 years his senior, one who has no superpowers but plenty of charisma and a dad who knows how to shoot video.

埃文, whose parents don’t publicize his last name for privacy reasons, has racked up more than 300 million views and 420,他的视频在YouTube上有5000名订阅者 埃文TubeHD通道. The channel’s premise is a simple one, based on the unboxing videos that have been a staple of user-generated video since YouTube launched a decade ago: 埃文 opens up toys -- Legos and Angry Birds are his favorites -- and shows how they work. 他的父亲, 贾里德, runs a single camera and applies a few basic video effects such as rewind, 慢动作, and time-lapse (How else are you going to show a kid putting together a 1200-plus piece Lego version of the Millennium Falcon?), 像我儿子这样的孩子会发疯, watching the same videos over and over, 甚至模仿埃文的评论. After a recent haircut, Ike even proclaimed proudly, “It looks just like 埃文!”

So what’s this got to do with this year’s 流媒体 Industry 原始资料? When publisher Joel Unickow and I sat down to decide on this year’s cover theme, 我们不断地回想起那些陈词滥调, content为王. Everything that’s written about in these pages ultimately revolves around that simple phrase.

或者我们是这么认为的. Joel posted the striking cover image on his Facebook page, and soon a discussion ensued over whether the cliché remains true. 一些业内资深人士也表示赞同, arguing that from an investment perspective, great content doesn’t matter if you don’t have an audience. And soon the debate became more nuanced. Great content will always find an audience even if the platform is lousy, 一位评论者写道, while merely good content needs more help by being on an already popular platform or surfacing via search and social media. Even downright bad content can find an audience, he wrote, just by being on every platform possible. And once a platform’s audience has been built, then it will use that platform to seek out new content before seeking another one.

所以今天, 有人可能会说, we’re looking not so much at a monarchy but a triumvirate, 在观众, content, and technology are equally important in the eyes of investors and stakeholders. 平台和服务，如Roku, 网飞公司, and YouTube have found their way into just about everyone’s homes and onto their devices, so they are now driving investment and dictating what content rises to the top. 和它一样好, 埃文TubeHD is still relatively long-tail content that never would have never found a home on UHF or basic cable. It has been able to achieve tremendous success via YouTube, which has no barrier to entry for either the content (anyone can create a show and post it) or audience (anyone with an internet connection can watch). But even though every 埃文TubeHD video is preceded by a pre-roll, the advertising isn’t relevant to the target audience -- elementary school-aged kids. Sometimes it’s not even appropriate; a random sample of recent episodes featured ads for not only Toyota and Dannon yogurt but Bud Light.

Can you imagine the uproar if Nickelodeon started accepting beer commercials? 很明显, there remains a disconnect among the triumvirate, although as you’ll see in the pages of this year’s 原始资料, each element is evolving exponentially compared to previous years. 不过，还有很多工作要做. 我们开始吧.

本文发表于2014年 流媒体源手册 如《欧洲杯在哪投注app最新版下载》.”