I’ve been thinking about costs a lot lately. One of my jobs at blip is to control our technology and bandwidth costs as much as possible. I was reading this when I started to wonder about the relative costs for content creators. By relative I mean something like percentage of total money available. In the old days an independent would have to get another mortgage to make high-quality video content.
I could be way off here, but I think that now more than any other time is the cost skewed toward the independent creator. For big studios, used to big studio thinking, the cost and risk associated with breaking new ground is huge. For the scrappy independent, it’s cheaper than ever.
As competition amongst the mid-tail heats up and the demand for quality goes up, those costs will begin to rise again. Like what happened with video games, with rare exception, you won’t be able to do it in your basement anymore. As the bigger studios who survive begin to adapt, these costs will begin to approach each other. That said, the opportunities for the independents will also rise and begin to meet those of the bigger studios.
