Just read an interesting post on NewTeeVee about CNET’s efforts to incubate web videos and episodic videoblogs with cash grants. It sheds a little more light on the Project Spotlight campaign they announced last year. They’ll be offering production budgets to creators who bring them an idea for a series they like, which will run for a time on Webshots but ultimately be owned by the creators.

It looks like yet another good potential venue for independent video makers to make money — I like this trend of companies actively seeking proposals and funding new projects in a creator-friendly way. Hearing words like “incubator” can give dot-com survivors like me a bit of a cold sweat, but when you look closely, you’ll see that many of these are pretty disciplined efforts, with a modest amount of money being spent and a care not to overextend the way that some of the high-flying startups of that previous era did.

If we’re disciplined with money, we can work with more people and create more opportunities, as well as have a better chance of helping worthy shows have time to find their voice and build an audience while we work on creating sustainable income to keep things going. It’s a big part of what we’re doing at Next New (more details on that soon, or just contact us); and you have Super Deluxe and Podtech offering attractive deals to creators as well, such as the recent deals announced with Ryanne Hudson and Jay Dedman, Bill Streeter, and Fark TV.

We know some of the CNET team — they gave us some helpful advice and feedback while we were starting our company, and I thought they were smart and engaging and really liked how they thought about content. And by getting people like Schlomo Rabinowitz, a longtime booster and active participant in the vlogging scene, involved, they’re making some really smart moves. Their seed show for the program, WINK, looks pretty good — here’s a teaser they put together for NewTeeVee:

One thing about their approach I was curious about — it seems that shows they fund would be exclusive to Webshots.com (and other CNET sites, plus wherever you could embed their player) — as opposed to available in other places, like downloadable versions or RSS and iTunes feeds. I haven’t asked them about this to confirm, but I’m hoping they’ll be setting these shows free and letting them spread outside the web platform. It’s hard for anyone to argue with YouTube’s success, considering they’ve never offered anything beyond the Flash player, but it seems like there’s a win in making programming available in as many formats and places as reasonable, and trying to meet the audience wherever they might be.

We won’t know for a while which approach is the right one — any of these could be, or none. But it’s encouraging seeing more and more companies making real investments in the space and beginning to create a marketplace for people to do good work.

Please promulgate us on the interweb.

Posted by Tim at 9:15 pm on Monday, January 29th, 2007 in Media, Vlogs. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.