A three hour digital business?

I spent an enjoyable afternoon last week attempting to “Set up a Digital Content Business in Three Hours” with a group of students from the MA Media Enterprise course at UCE. The workshop came from an idea that course director Annette Naudin and I had been talking about for some time and it was great to finally have a chance to put it into action.

It’s coming to the end of the year-long course and the idea was to have a fun session which tied together many of the other parts of the course as well as demonstrating some new ideas around web-based, long tail business models.

We asked everyone to bring along an idea for a video series which could be sold on the web to a niche market.

After some discussion round a varied set of ideas, we settled on a series of videos which demonstrate “How to Haggle”.
The first video was scripted, filmed, uploaded and was ready for sale on Brightcove by the end of the session. In the meantime we developed a marketing strategy and worked through basic financials on the product, leaving us with a business plan and first product ready for sale after three hours.

Here’s the video if you’re interested (you should be if you ever spend time at flea markets!). Apologies for the visual / sound quality.

The idea was to demonstrate at every stage the differences between traditional broadcast models (high costs, high break even point, large target market) as opposed to new, long tail models (low costs, low break evens, niche markets).

It was great fun and I think some of the ideas generated in the session were very interesting. Thanks to everyone for being such good sports!