Why We’re Building a Media Company Focused on Community
On October 30th, 2014, TIME emphatically announced that “The Post-Television TV Era Has Begun” — TV being defined as “actual, mainstream, desirable TV content.” A declaration to which every person born after 1979 with access to high speed internet and a computer uttered an imaginary “Duh.”
This headline was delivered shortly after HBO announced it was “unbundling” its service from cable television providers to launch a standalone streaming service. The future had indeed arrived, delivering with it Game of Thrones and Silicon Valley, and it was bright — like 4K bright.
Television was officially dead, and with it went the constructs of the 22-minute sitcom and 45-minute drama and their associated commercial interruptions, things that few amongst us will miss. However, so too went a bastion of free local speech and source of ceaseless entertainment — otherwise known as public access television — which one could argue has been dead for some time now.
Public-access television was launched around 1971 by way of a federal mandate from the FCC, requiring all cable systems to set aside cable channels for public, educational, and local government programming along with access to equipment and studios for public use.
And for a while, public access was the best thing ever. You, or your brother, or your neighbor that was into thrash metal, could have a show on television that members of your very own community could tune into and watch. You could use this medium to drum up meaningful dialogue about an issue facing your community, or you could draw psychic portraits of your friends on air, or discuss personal psycho-spiritual sexual issues. Anything went.
Perhaps public access’ pièce de résistance came out of New York City. Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party premiered in December of 1978, airing on Tuesday nights from 12:30–1:30am on cablecast. Its viewers were treated to “sub-realism” from O’Brien and his co-host Chris Stein, as well as drop-in visits from the likes of The Clash, Nile Rodgers, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Byrne and Debbie Harry. Walter Steding and his TV Party “orchestra” provided musical ambiance.
Billed as “the TELEVISION SHOW that’s a COCKTAIL PARTY but which is also a POLITICAL PARTY” [sic] it often aired in front of a live studio audience, making it a very meta collaboration with New York’s creative community. Sure, the guests and studio audience were cool, but so were the viewers who stayed up late to tune in. Everyone involved in this food chain of host, guest, attendee and viewer was linked by their investment and interest in New York’s downtown art scene. They cared about the players in their community, what they were up to, and the challenges they faced, and they wanted to know how they could get involved.
Fast forward 30-odd years at 20x speed and you’ll see: Reagan, two Bushes, two Clintons and one Al Gore, to whom we owe it all. The Internet arrived gradually, and then suddenly, exploding onto the scene and insinuating itself into the very fiber of our beings.
The Internet is an inherently global medium, which is one of many reasons why it’s the new best thing ever. Instead of a public access program only being available to the constituents that live in a particular geographic area, we can now broadcast this signal to anyone who wishes to view it. But that is also kind of the problem. The Internet is a big place, and it’s easy to get lost or make a wrong turn on the information super highway. It’s also easy to isolate and turn inward in this 2D world where the answer to every inane question that pops into your head is literally a keystroke away.
The Internet Age is lacking a medium invested in the creative endeavors of local communities, a void that public access used to fill.
This is why we created NYC.TV.
NYC.TV is a video-only platform, featuring programming made by New York City creators. We’re all about quality, creators and community.
NYC.TV is phase one of an independent media network that is dedicated to broadcasting the creative output of cities around the globe. That being said, we’re not really a physical location, or even a digital one.
We have a distributed media model, which means we bring videos made by New York City creators to the places you already look for video, i.e. YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Vine and Snapchat. We don’t care where you watch them, because our metric of success is aggregated views.
NYC.TV aims to create a sustainable model for quality video made by New York’s creative community. That’s right — unlike public access, we intend to make money. But we don’t have any impression-based advertising on our site or our videos. That means we don’t have pre-roll and we don’t have banner ads.
Why? Because the traditional publishing model that employs impression-based advertising is broken — something no one in the industry wants to admit.
But when a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.2% is considered a success for a banner ad or pre-roll, we’ve all got to do a reality check. That means you are statistically more likely to complete Navy Seal training than you are to meaningfully click on a banner ad. We think native advertising is the future, as it provides value to everyone involved: the viewer, the brand, and, dare I say, the world.
Which brings me back to the community. Once we start to monetize, which won’t be until 2016, we are going to share profits with video creators through the avenues of brand sponsorship, native content, and licensing and distribution. We’ll even entertain product placement when the product is authentic to the story we are telling.
NYC.TV is an ambitious undertaking. But it’s also something that is sorely lacking in the Internet landscape. We are creating a platform invested in the creative community of New York, propelling its creative output far and wide. We’d love for you to join the cause. So check out the page, and our Kickstarter campaign, to learn more about our unique model and please donate if you can.
Take a look at NYC.TV. There’s something here for everyone — just like New York City.
