Understanding quality in online video (or angry birds are cool)

Link of the day for anyone working in online video comes from Loïc, talking about the views on the videos they created around last year’s Le Web.

Which one fared worst? The high-production value, highly-edited one.

The most watched? Tweet tweet rage…

It’s increasingly clear that the definition of “high quality” in online video is radically different to that seen in TV production, and most attempts to port TV values over to the web lead to disappointing results at best, and abject failure at worst.

But then, the TV industry should know that. They had to get over the paradigm of just pointing cameras at theatre productions a few decades back…

I have three rules for online video:

1. Experiment cheap
2. Focus on content quality, not production values
3. Analyse your metrics ruthlessly and use them to inform your next experiments

If you really want to produce TV-style video, than the TV business might be a better place to work. 😉