Here's a good basic rule of thumb: when something new is discovered, the first ones there get the best spots.
MSDOS might not have been the most elegant or sophisticated operating system in the world when Bill Gates released it in 1981, (in fact, it was designed by Tim Paterson, and Gates bought it for $75,000), but Gates and Microsoft were first 'out of the box' when personal computer were launched. The rest is history.
The same holds true in the world of television. When cable took us from five channels to 500, it was virgin territory in media land.
In 1982, when cable was just getting started in the US, John Hendricks, an employee at the local university in Maryland, started a small company to provide documentaries for the new and empty cable channels. Today, that little company is worth $27bn. It's called Discovery Networks. Hendricks was successful because he was there first.
Today we are the edge of a second revolution, like the cable one, that is going to take us from 500 channels to, well, infinite. The internet is about to become the single largest provider of television content, eclipsing and probably killing cable and satellite. It's a trillion dollar business about to start and some of the world's biggest players are putting down their chips.
Google, of course, was the first out of the gate with YouTube. And YouTube rapidly proved the point that people would both watch YouTube – it is now the fourth most trafficked site in the world, with a billion unique visitors a month – and that they would upload content. Today, more than 100 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute.
YouTube may have been the first, but it is not going to be the last. Microsoft, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, Sony, Roku and a dozen others have all announced that they too are launching or, like Netflix, enhancing their content offerings.
None of these companies work as a content creator like the BBC or CNN. They are, instead, platforms that are going to require endless amounts of content. And where are they going to get it from? They are going to buy it. These are also companies that are sitting on a lot of cash, and are, apparently, ready to start spending it.
Recently, Intel, the famous maker of chips, announced that they too would soon be launching their own network or channel or whatever you want to call it. But, unlike, say the UK's local TV initiative, Intel announced that they had $2bn they were prepared to spend on content.
And where is all of this new content going to come from? Some will come from major studios such as Dreamworks. But Dreamworks only produces about a dozen movies a year. Intel, Sony, Amazon and the rest of them are going to need a lot more material than that. So some of it just might come from you. And why not? Got a camera? Got a laptop or iPad? That's about all it takes. That and a good idea and, of course, a bit of training.
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