How does one begin life as an internet TV mogul?
Welcome to Teleblog.TV, the observations and experiences in internet television of an ex-Daily Mail journalist called James Black and a few of his, patently, more interesting friends.
But where to start?
In my case everything started when I accepted a friendly bet from Roger Greenhalgh, a computer genius who created the popular PetrolBusters website with me several years earlier. The bet was simple: I had suggested that anyone could find fame in North America and Europe through internet TV. All you needed was a cheap camera, a good microphone, interesting material, wonderful locations and amiable people – and you couldn’t fail.
It all sounded very plausible in my ‘I can do anything’ brain.
I’d figured that the internet video player technology combined with faster broadband speeds was just at the right point in time to make internet TV watchable to a large computer-smart audience, so I further upped the bet by boasting that even without YouTube it would be possible. In fact, in the face of what was happening for real at the time, even a person who represented the completely wrong demographic (ie. wasn’t female, bubbly, good-looking and twenty-one, which seemed to be the ONLY demographic working at that time) could do it!
The deal was done. I had fifty days to prove it was possible and at the end of my experiment EVERYONE important would come running to my door with offers of money, contracts, fame, maybe even my own terrestrial news show or seat on the BBC and CBS board of directors. They had to, I would have proved that internet TV was possible, and inexpensive. The old media types would be desperate to hang on to my new media success, while the new media types would be impressed with my old media emphasis on keeping things professional and accurate.
Win Win Win.
And so, with new laptop, new camera, new microphone, new mobile phone, and new suits (four – all the same) I set off around the world with various friends and acquaintances to go use up my contacts book, pulling interviews with fab people and getting into interesting places like the top of Big Ben or behind the scenes at the Hoover Dam. Oh, life, bring it on, this was going to be fun.
On New Years Eve 2006 we had recorded enough initial film to record and edit our first ‘episode’ and by the morning of New Years Day 2007 it had been uploaded onto DailyMotion and had been then embedded onto a very simple web page. The new daily internet television series had arrived. It’s name, AnsaThat.com and it was GREAT.
And so, with first episode out to a waiting world we sat and waited for the cheers and accolades – BUT nothing happened… nothing, nothing, nothing.
The episode was brilliant, well-scripted, fun, and full of everything the BBC could ever have wanted in a programme if they had been anywhere near as brave as we in this new media world… it educated, informed and entertained. The show was perfect, but as Oscar Wilde once nearly remarked: “the audience was a disaster”. Actually, in our case, the audience weren’t so much a disaster as not actually even aware we existed.
All these lessons, and so quick they came. We understood how to present, how to film, how to edit, how to upload onto our site – but now promotion was the new goal.
Actually, I must confess, I found the promotion the absolutely most relaxing and easy part of the whole process. I knew how to get a message across from my many years as a journalist at the Daily Mail observing how badly most organisations were at even sending a press release and now I had my chance to shine on the ‘dark side’. I became a momentary PR expert and social media guru, and the fact that we were mentioned everywhere throughout January and February 2007 ensured we found a very large, very appreciative, and highly enthusiastic, audience. Still the consumate professional, I was ‘technically’ still in the employ of the Daily Mail, so we were ‘down’ access to one of the country’s most infuential newspapers as I really couldn’t hassle them or send a press release.
The time during the fifty days was one great big whizz of travel, filming, script-writing, organising, telephoning, e-mailing, texting, interviewing (and being interviewed), editing, promoting, press-releasing, cajouling, arguing, laughing, laughing, crying and laughing.
I went from unfamous to web-famous in the blink of an eye. I was honoured to be the BBC Radio One ‘Web Celeb of the Week’ sharing a Sunday evening show with Russell Brand, mentioned in newspapers wherever I went and passing every ‘quiet’ moment I had having a chat with, what felt like, every radio presenter who ever existed. I was especially happy to discover that Ansathat’s library backdrop (real books by the way) had made me a librarian posterboy.
Yes, I had travelled the world, I was the man who discovered the timber from the original Mayflower ship was now a barn in England, stayed in every hotel room in Vegas, counted £1 million in coins with veteran comedian Frank Carson, found the two ends of the World War One trench system, sat alone in a deserted Trafalgar Square on my office swivel-chair, been attacked by a skunk in Florida, driven 100 times up and down San Francisco’s steepest hill, and had a million and one adventures…
..sadly, at no point in the proceedings did we ever consider whether this was mid-life fun or real business!
Towards the end of the fifty days, even when we got offers of advertising and a call from a telecoms executive wanting to discuss ’signing us up’ we treated it as though it wasn’t real. And actually, it wasn’t, it was an experiment, even though it felt better than any normal way of living.
At the end of fifty days, even though I was desperate for this fun to continue, I had to close the book on the Ansthat.com chapter. My report on internet TV, especially the part about professional journalists being pushed out by citizen journalists made the very highbrow business pages and even BrandRepublic took a look at what had happened.
Several people came forward wanting to be the ‘new’ presenter of Ansathat, but all quickly disappeared when they realised we didn’t have a budget – and certainly didn’t have a masterplan to make money.
Within a few weeks, and after realising that I could no longer just use anyone’s music as background to our films, we pulled all the film down and turned off the website. All that remains is a very lame film about D-Day and some footage of me singing the Japanese National Anthem put up on YouTube by one of the helpers, for his own amusement, a few days before the experiment began.
Ansathat was over, but I had been bitten by the internet TV bug. From now on I was committed to developing internet TV but I knew I had so much more to learn.
And my Japanese needed to improve.