Graphics...
Okay... With reference to graphics. Please don't tell Google and Craigslist that they will fail if they don't have nice graphics. As we bring up millions of videos all nicely categorized, graphics become less and less important.
Something to consider. If you are developing one channel or two channels, its fairly easy to deal with graphics. If you are dealing with hundreds of domains running a platform that gets upgraded regularly, it takes on a whole new set of complexities and costs. You have to make sure that your upgrade engine can upgrade the channels without blowing up the graphics or remove the need for a designer to constantly fix. add new buttons and support your custom front end. You would need an army of designers to deal with, say 500 channels. Many domain holders here on Namepros have dozens and some hundreds of domains. It's unrealistic for these domain holders to develop a slick/pretty front-end to these domains, individually. Once you make one upgrade to the feature set, you have to have a designer work it in. People touting this notion have 0 development background or they have millions of dollars and an army of designers.
Look at Veoh.com for instance. Veoh is an "aggregator". They are doing something similar to Impel.TV. Gathering all/most of the free video content on the Internet. The difference is they have one front-end to deal with. What makes us special is we are a network of smartly named domains and the content is parsed/placed within the relevant domain. Much, much harder to deal with graphics. Impel.TV is a "packager" using hundreds of domains with hundreds of front-ends.
I respect what National.TV is trying to do with election.tv, but its not realistic to do this over all their domain names. They have hundreds of domains. It's not a wonder they are looking for money. They will need a TON of money to make all their domains look as nice as election.tv. Our channel voteguide.tv has nearly 3000 videos and our politicalguide.tv has another 4500. Both these channels are sneaking up to the top of the search engines, because of content. For the words US Election Televisionโ already voteguide.tv is on the first page of Yahoo. We'll soon turn our newly tweaked autofeed system onto YouTube and other services and add 10's of thousands more videos about politics, the search engines will look even more kindly on these channels. As we roll out marketing, it will be hard to compete with these channels. I have talked to the VC's at National.TV, they seem like swell guys. But they are concentrating on looks, not content, from what I can tell?
In Feb. we had a nice common front-end, that we could deploy network wide, created by a talented designer. We chose to sit on it and concentrate on content. Soon we will roll out this simple design across the network. The design has to work with the network, not the other way around. Not to mention, television networks have to work with television remote controls. As these .tv's roll onto our televisions via set-top boxes, many of these designs you seeing will not work effectively with the buttons on a remote control.
If you're interested in seeing this "common design strategy", PM me and I will email you a couple of snapshots.
I hope that this post is not taken as an advertisement for Impel.TV. I am simply trying to educate the differences in developing a single Website and a television network. Hopefully this post will help give ideas/considerations to multiple domain holders considering developing their names?
Dave Lalande
Impel.TV
We continue to build our television channel platform. We still think that content is king and that look is secondary.
