Introducing.. Oh Word TV

Lately I’ve been returning repeatedly to two questions:

Would a site where an interesting guide curated video selections be a worthwhile project?

Web video flips our notion of television on its head. Your cable subscription still offers broadcasters pushing their message at you, but more and more people are pulling videos themselves via the web. It’s commonly stated that “pull” has won out over “push” on the Internet. On the one hand, this is great because it decentralizes the whole medium of video. But the part to be navigated is figuring out just what you should be pulling. How to discover new things.

For some people, web video is all about waiting until the latest giant viral video reaches them via their social network. Of course, things reach me this way as well but I’ve always been the kid looking to see what lives in the dark under the rocks. There’s a ton of great material that for whatever reason is unlikely to spread to the masses. Enter the idea of a curator: a guide to help you discover great videos you may never have seen otherwise, to separate the wheat from the chaff and to actually craft an experience for the audience.

And the second question concerns growing the Internets Celebrities:

Do ?uestlove’s words about being part of something bigger than yourself apply to web shows? Would an alliance or network of web shows help each one out?

Answer for this one: “Yes, but….”

Logically, it makes sense. A good partnership benefits all parties, cross-promotion, increasing clout for sponsors or viewers, not to mention the idea of creating a destination of some sort.

On the other hand, there are pitfalls. The shows have to make sense together and they have to retain their autonomy. And to really move in this direction as a business you need a budget and you need a huge audience.

Fortunately, I’m not a businessman or a business, maaaan! I don’t need to understand an endgame to try things out and I don’t let people telling me it’s not worth it drag me down. The web is a sandbox. You can just try things out with basically zero friction and worry about the consequences later.

So in the interest of experimentation, I spent $75 on a Wordpress theme and one day of my time creating Oh Word TV.

I’m already loving the fact that it helps me push out daily content to the 2,000+ subscribed to Oh Word’s RSS feed. (By the way, sorry about some RSS shenanigans over the past day or two as I merged the feeds. That should no longer be an issue.)

It took me three conversations to create totally casual and delightfully non-commital alliances with three great web series: Ill Doctrine, Yours Truly and Dollar Van Demos. It’s the best kind of partnership, one where nobody is asking anything of the other! If the site surprises and draws a ton of people we can revisit the conversation later but for now it’s just about creating cool channels to embed their videos on.

And then there’s the all-important Loosies section for my video picks from around the web. To me, this is a much more satisfying approach than the Youtube Playlist embedding I’d tried out at the start of the month.

I hope you enjoy it. And I’m curious about any feedback you might have. Over and out.