Had a nice chat with Stefan Dubowski, a reporter with The Wire Report a couple of days ago. He was looking for comments on Remstar Broadcasting Inc.’s proposed short form user-generated content channel called Generation V. He informed me that according to GenV’s CRTC broadcast licence the new channel must provide 95 per cent user-generated content.
He wanted to know if the idea was realistic in light of my experience producing CBC Radio 3 and CBC Television’s Zed and Exposure (all properties supported heavily by user content).
He asked the same of Jeffrey Elliot at GlassBox TV, Gregory Taylor, an expert in broadcasting policy at McGill University, and Trevor Doerksen at MoboVivo.
Today the story came out with the headline:
“Generation V to face challenges in advertising, logistics, carriage, experts say”
That pretty much sums it up. Producing a 24/7 channel dedicated to user-gen is going to face many challenges. It’s hard enough making a one-hour weekly out from user content. As I say in the article…
Embury said the industry is learning that user-generated content isn’t always easy to work with. “There was this mistaken notion a few years ago, and I’m sure it still exists in some forms, that you create this system, and people upload all this content, and there’s your free show,” he said. “But these shows often take more work to produce than some forms of TV.”
Even Al Gore and Joel Hyatt’s lauded Current TV, which was the first American 24-hour network based around viewer-created content has had trouble sustaining itself recently. And that’s after cutting deals, which bring it into millions of homes in the US and the UK. It’s too bad because I really like Current TV and have very high hopes for it.
And, despite the challenges ahead of them, I have high hopes for the team at Generation V. Their success will depend on working closely with a great creative community, developing entertaining formats that makes the content uploaded digestible and appealing to TV audiences, and convincing advertisers they have the eyeballs. If they do that and work really, really hard, who knows?
For a fee you can read the entire story.
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