Big Think - Great idea, small audience?

Was fascinated to read of Big Think on Beet.tv (thanks to Weaverluke for pointer). Big Think is a sort of "Thinking Person's Youtube".

It's been interesting to see the emergence of many types of Web TV formats over the last year or so, as it moves from IPTV to the the simple "today's stuff over PC" models of Joost, to UGC via YouTube et al, to Videoblogs and now to "Videomails" from Seesmic and similar.

However, most of that is still really entertainment media. Educational, Informational media as a service rather than just clips to my mind up till now has been the province of events such as TED, to my mind Wallstrip was the first commercial "thinking person's" Web TV service play.

But that, like the UK's iBall (which we were involved with) are focussed on specific niches, whereas this is a Generic "Serious WebTV" play. It will be interesting to see how it fits in between TED, the BBC, and (we predict) the increasing amount of "thinking person's UGC" that lower cost of media capture will bring out.

Not clear on the business model, but production costs will be a major issue we suspect - as Beet notes, the Big Think:

..clips are highly stylized. The producers use a method created by the great documentary maker Errol Morris, known to millions for his Academy Award opening show short film in 2002. Watching the Oscar film, you will see the Big Think look: The subject is in front of white background, looking into the camera. In Morris' approach, interviewees see the interviewer on a TV screen in front of them, but reply to text question displayed before them. The interviewer is not in the room.

As Beet also notes, for some subjects, this works brilliantly, but for others who speak extemporaneously into the camera, the results can be flat. "The always ebullient Sir Richard Branson might have given a better performance if he was speaking with someone off camera". This is the reason why iBall uses face to face interviewing for now.

Precisely what formats will work for what sort of service is still very unclear in this new video medium, which is still finding its way, but I do note that one old media staple - the "high F factor"* presenter - is still being used by the Intellekshul TV genre

UPDATE - Joshua March has commented below that its to be .......Ad supported

*Look it up............