I was having dinner with my good friend and Fin co-founder Andrew Kortina, when we began talking about the nature of good editing.
Kortina pointed out that many good TV series—like “House of Cards,” or “Mad Men,” or even “Game of Thrones”—would be significantly better if they were dramatically edited down. Sometimes removing characters, episodes, or even, occasionally, seasons, would make story lines sharper and more compelling.
But we are moving in the opposite direction. We’ve seen a proliferation of longer content, along with more content, because media companies think longer equals more attention. That means they can sell more ads. And content producers are often paid based on how much they produce. They make more for a 1-hour show than for a 30-minute one.
We’ve swung too far, and consumers, who value their time more because they have more choices than ever for how to spend it, are suffering. Moreover, while super fans of a given show will always want more content, I think companies could maximize the audience for their content by editing it down.
Cutting Down the Kardashians
Take academic books. Most are much longer than they need to be to actually get their point across. A good example is Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” As far as I can tell, the argument of the book is interesting—but should take thirty pages to explain, not seven hundred.
Or, reality television. I wonder how long an episode of “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” is if you remove all the recaps? How long would an entire season take to watch if you edited it to the interesting and meaningful parts?
I will admit I have never seen an episode. But pattern matching from other reality TV I have been forced to watch, I bet you could cut 80% to 90% of the time and be left with a pretty engaging few minutes per episode that more people would want to watch. I’d even pay more for the so called “Editors Cut” version because it would be more valuable to me. This is probably even more true of competition shows like “The Voice.” Just want the highlights.
I bet there is also a potential market in buying the rights to B-films, or old movies, and editing them to reach different audiences. You could re-release them on IPTV or as in-flight content. This could be an entirely new industry, almost the DJ-ification of video. Remix old discarded content into something new and engaging.
Snapchat as Editor
The value of editing also has some interesting implications for the live video wars playing out online.
I am pretty interested in live-streaming via Facebook Live, as well as Periscope and Meerkat before it. But all suffer from the fact that unedited content is mostly bad.
It is extremely hard for a normal person to be engaging live for several minutes, especially without an editor (I know I am not). So, when you are watching live web platforms, you are mostly consuming poor content.
Live might be great for celebrities and people with huge production teams, but the average person is absolutely not capable of producing interesting live content when competing with produced content.
There are product solutions to this. Snapchat stories is a clever example of pioneering product work to solve this class of problems. The stories people construct feel like a stitched together “live” experience of their days.
But because they are constructed piece by piece and the producer has good editing tools, the content is, on-average, far more compelling than straight live material. Also, on the consumption side, the ability for the consumer to easily jump to the next clip creates a compressed consumption experience which overall feels pretty high quality.
Pure live streaming doesn’t have the solutions that Snapchat introduced. So, someone has to figure out how to edit it if it is going to be used by anyone other than celebrities.
Some product ideas are letting users jump to popular points in the videos based on user feedback (hearts / comments / etc). Or, you could figure out a way to introduce editors (real or algorithmic.)
Any way you slice it, the value of editing is rising for many consumers, leading to big business opportunities for those who capitalize on them.