HOW TO START AND RUN YOUR OWN TV NETWORK

The iPhone is an amazing tool for journalism and content creation.

There, in your pocket, you have about $10 million worth of equipment, or what would have cost you $10 million only a few years ago.

The phone has a broadcast quality camera, but it not only shoot professional video, it also lets you edit it, add graphics, music, photos. Then, it lets you ‘share’ it with the rest of the world for free. Oh, you can also go live to the planet at the touch of a button.

I have been in the television business for 30 years.

When I started, a broadcast quality camera cost upwards of $50,000. You needed a cameraman to shoot anything. A professional edit suite could cost as much as $1 million and you definitely needed a professional editor to run it. As for graphics, and music, well that was a whole department or two. Going live? You needed a satellite uplink or at least a microwave truck. These are not things that the average person bought. So the ‘power’ of television, the power of video, was limited to a very small number of people, all of whom, more or less, were employees of some giant media conglomerate.

The media conglomerate then decided what you got to see, or not to see.

You had no choice.

Your view of the world was entirely circumscribed by what NBC or Disney or New Corp decided you should see.

And not see.

This gave people a very skewed perspective on the world.

We say today that more and more people get their news from the web, but even in today’s online world, 57% of us still go to television as our primary source of news and information. And, a great deal of what is accessed online (for the 38% that go there), is in fact a link to something that first appeared on TV news.

Video is a remarkably powerful medium for communicating ideas. It captures us in ways that print does not. (A mere 20% of Americans now get their news from newspapers). But that is because, in a kind of Greshams’ Law of Media, the more dynamic media tend to drive out the less dynamic media. Photographs are more popular than print (see Instagram); video is more popular than photos (see Facebook and Youtube).

The average American today watches an astonishing 5 hours of television a day. Compare that to the 19 minutes that the average American spends reading each day. So what is on TV matters, and who gets to decide what is on TV (and what is not) matters a great deal.

Until now, we had no choice as to what the ‘networks’ decide to run. We were passive viewers. In the words of AJ Libeling in 1960, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”. In 1960, that meant NBC or CBS or The New York Times. Presses were expensive to buy and to run.

But today, anyone who owns an iPhone or a Smart Phone owns a press.

They need only use it.

There is no longer any barrier to entry. Anyone may start their own TV station now, and married to the Internet, broadcast for free to some 3 billion people worldwide.

For thirty years we have been in the business of building TV networks all over the world. Our clients used to be limited to governments or massive media companies. This is no longer the case. Today, anyone can build and run their own TV network. We can show you how. It’s simple. And powerful.

for more information go to: TheVJ.com