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By Root 760 0

some networks is satisfied with 150,000 viewers). Just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean it’s small. But its costs are. Nonfiction TV—news shows, not scripted dramas—on broadcast networks costs about $300,000 an hour to produce. An hour of Revision3 programming costs a tenth of that. Internet TV can get even cheaper. In 2007, I visited 18 Doughty Street, a five-hour-a-night Tory talk-show network in London that broadcast on the internet from a townhouse living-room set with all the trappings of TV: couches, seven cameras, a control studio, and potted palms. I asked Iain Dale, the founder, to calculate his per-hour cost for talk. It came out to $140. Sure, the comparisons are unfair. News networks have journalists, bureaus, producers, executives, expensive anchors, writers, makeup people, hair people, camera people, sound people, directors, and free muffins. But do they need all that? In 2007, I wrote and recorded an opinion piece for a short-lived segment on the CBS Evening News (it never aired—my mention of dethroned anchor Dan Rather may have had something to do with that). Up to the taping, I saw 12 people involved, which didn’t include countless more editors and unseen executive producers and technicians. That day at home I used the same script to record the same opinions on my Mac. Cost: zip.

Movies are worse. Not long ago, I happened on a studio shoot in Manhattan. Even though I’d covered the industry for years, I was amazed anew at the cost of it, at the stuff they drag around. On one truck, a huge container was filled with nothing but blocks of wood with Paramount’s logo burned onto them. Of course, studios do need much of this stuff to make movies that will look great on a big screen. But do they need it all? Diggnation has just a camera pointed at its couch. It entertains, too.

In the text web, the delta—the difference—in cost between the old and new way is enormous; that is what has led no end of bloggers and newcomers to create content sites. In film and video, that delta is many times larger, which I believe will lead to even more investment in online shows, as the opportunities are even greater. Revision3 started on a shoestring but received a reported $9 million investment to create more shows, build a studio, and hire its CEO. It’s still run on a shoestring, CEO Jim Louderback told me. “The story of the internet,” he said, “is ruthlessly efficient business models and blowing away barriers to entry and access.”

Revision3 saved money on equipment, which Louderback credited to Moore’s Law. Intel’s Gordon Moore decreed in 1965 that the number of transistors and thus the computing power on a chip would double every two years (this law enabled Google and the internet to exist and led to every law in this book). The cost of digital cameras has thus plummeted. Revision3 goes Cadillac with an $8,500 model but I’ve seen newspapers and even TV stations recording high-definition segments with $1,000 handhelds. Instead of a fancy TelePrompTer (and expensive writing team to fill it with words), Revision3 uses a cheap LCD screen and mirror. Instead of editing suites that once cost tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, they edit on Macs. The only equipment that doesn’t benefit from Moore’s Law, Louderback said, is the handmade Italian pedestal for moving cameras while shooting. It has no electronics but relies on precision ball bearings. Damned atoms.

Staff costs are low, too. Instead of hiring pretty faces with good hair to read the words writers put on TelePrompTers, Revision3 hires hosts with knowledge and passion about their topics and the ability to attract a community. Distribution costs little because there are so many partners, including Google’s YouTube, that can spread video around. Marketing? No need for that when you have a loyal audience. I stood in that audience when Diggnation came to New York and 2,000 people showed up (I was the oldest geek there and sympathized with my son, who was standing next to the only head of gray hair in the place; it was like having your mom take you to a Stones