Videoblogging in HD - My take

Scoble just showed us all the $4,000 HD-DV camera he bought for doing a video show, and the panel is explaining to us how if you’re going to be doing videoblogging and you want to get noticed, you have to meet a minimum standard in editing quality and video quality. They seem to think that if you’re going to do it, you ought to do it in HD.

I disagree. I think their reasoning breaks down as follows:

• HD broadcasters are looking for scarce content. If you have good HD content, they might buy it off you.
• Video is going to be trending upwards in quality, and eventually everyone will use HD, so you might as well do HD now.

Well, my take is different:

• It’s all about the aesthetic. Hand-held non-HD is OK, in fact it’s great, for basic videoblogging, because videoblogging is, like blogging, a personal medium. The “real” aesthetic that you get — like you did in The Blair Witch Project — will work with you, not against you.
• Serving HD content, if you’re doing it yourself, is a pain in the–
• For most business videoblogging, you’re not aiming for the TV producer audience.
• On a computer screen, 640×480 is plenty big for a web-streaming video. HD doesn’t make a lick of difference until you go bigger than that.

They’re right that everything will eventually move to HD, but for now the infrastructure isn’t there to support it, and I’m not convinced it will be practical for at least five years. Making a much smaller investment in a regular camera and spending a bit more time on “post-production” (which is simpler than it sounds, and getting simpler) will be more than enough to get your business noticed in the videoblogging space.

Finally, and more importantly, I’m always convinced it’s more about the content than the quality. That’s why we like Beatles recordings better than, say, over-engineered O-Town, the Beatles made great songs.