Free Video?
I've been reading Free, a book by Chris Anderson (@chr1sa), Editor In Chief of Wired Magazine, for what seems like 6 months now. And on my 2 hour and 50 minute flight from Phoenix to Indianapolis, I finally finished it. Not that the book was boring. It was actually very thought provoking, so much so that it caused my mind to wander every time I picked it up, thinking of new ideas and determining how Chris' research applies to EVC and to the Event Video industry.
In many ways, Free reaffirmed some of the things we've started to implement over the last couple of years, and I think everyone could benefit from skimming over the book, or at least reading the first and last two chapters. Main idea: In this book, free refers mostly to online businesses or electronic media, and the dozens of very unique & creative ways in which entrepreneurs are inventing business models around it. Online, free is inevitable. Every year technology gets faster and cheaper, so Anderson recommends rounding down - stop charging for services that you make less and less from each year, and start figuring out other ways to make money.
With EVC, we're using free to give away live streaming coverage of some of our productions (more each year), in order to increase awareness of the video, and hopefully drive sales. Over the next few years, we intend to offer more and more ways for our customers to purchase productions at varying price and quality levels (download, DVD, blu-ray), while keeping the most basic version (low-quality streaming) free. For many of our customers, the free product will satisfy their needs. But for some, the portability of a DVD, quality of a Blu-ray, or flexibility of a downloaded file are reason enough to spend the extra money - and those are the purchases that subsidize the entire operation.
Another way to implement Free is to make the product cost nothing to the end-user (the customer), but make a profit elsewhere. Some examples of this would be to bundle a DVD in the cost of registration for an event, place advertisements within the video to subsidize the cost of the production, or allow a company to sponsor the entire production, even going as far as to put their branding on the DVD packaging.
Today's Free isn't about tricking the customer. But it is a business model that you can't ignore. Assuming technology continues at its current pace, and video distribution continues to get cheaper, you might as well stay ahead of the curve.
Read: Fittingly, you can download Free, by Chris Anderson, for no charge here: link. Or you can buy it the old fashioned way.
