B minor

In corporate strategy, theorists like to talk about the “wedge,” or the gap between cost of goods and a customer’s willingness to pay. This means that the company with the most sustainable strategy has the lowest cost of goods and the customers with the highest willingness to pay. (That’s a simplification, but bear with me).

The same could be said of content, if it weren’t for a complicating factor called quality. Whereas other industries have found ways to reduce the cost of goods without reducing the quality, content quality is still tied very closely to cost. (If you give a film student a prosumer camera and a modest budget, the discerning audience will still be able to target the work as sub-par when screened alongside a professionally produced film involving 35mm film cameras, etc.)

Recently, though, things have started to change. Technological advances have enabled the creation of high-quality content that rivals that of Hollywood. The question then remains, how long before a new system, a new content producing apparatus, springs forward to break the old-standing business model?

You can see some of this type of work happening around the web already. My friend Nathan Heleine of Crush + Lovely has been involved with this project called Fifty People, One Question. The videos are pretty astounding both from an editorial perspective and from a physical quality perspective. The photography is done by Benjamin Reece of The Deltree and it is just astounding (more of his stuff on his site). Worth checking out any of the links if you have time.

Projects like this are the future of moving image content.