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This article originally appeared in The Education Issue of APEX Experience.
When YouTube launched in 2005, it was hard to imagine a day when anyone, anywhere in the world, could and would post amateur videos to the site on a regular basis, much less watch videos posted by others. But 11 years on, even the Pope has a YouTube channel, and these days, user-generated content (UGC) platform pioneers like YouTube and Vimeo are just the tip of the new-media iceberg.
With more than 100 million people watching six-second Vines every month, Twitter’s looping-video app Vine has changed the way we watch online videos. Instagram’s Hyperlapse mobile app allows users to instantly convert raw, unwieldy, first-person video footage into smooth, Hollywood-quality time-lapse videos. Hipstamatic’s new Cinematic app offers users a chance to punch up their 15-second video clips with an array of retro, art-house-friendly filters. And the hugely popular Pippit mobile app – which bloggers are already excitedly describing as “Pinterest + Instagram + Feed Reader”- invites users to create and share video, photo and blog “pips” from their favorite bloggers, friends and brands within a single mobile app.
But perhaps the biggest news on the new-media frontier is the savvy way that UGC purveyors like digital camera/content providers GoPro and “visual storytelling” mobile app Storehouse are teaming with larger, established brands like Xbox Live and National Geographic, respectively, to spread the UGC gospel to a global audience.
And though the jury is still out on the success of Virgin America’s much ballyhooed partnership with GoPro (through a dedicated GoPro in-flight entertainment [IFE] channel) according to a recent piece in the Los Angeles Times, the popularity of GoPro’s unique brand of extreme, action-oriented UGC is soaring, with the company’s stock surging a whopping 279 percent since its IPO in June.
And while GoPro’s success elsewhere doesn’t necessarily translate to increased viewership in-flight, it does highlight the fact that new-media content providers, especially those who traffic in UGC, are definitely having a moment. So, one has to wonder if there’s a way for these new-media/airline partnerships to work on other carriers’ IFE systems as well.
“I don’t think airlines are ignoring [UGC]. Airlines [just] want their IFE content to please the largest number of customers.” -Henry Harteveldt, Atmosphere Research Group
“Much will depend on the demographics of an airline’s customers, the degree to which its customers engage in this type of [UGC], and whether the airline’s IFE configuration is extensive enough to justify dedicating a channel to this type of content,” says veteran industry analyst Henry Harteveldt, founder of the San Francisco-based Atmosphere Research Group.
Another potential stumbling block, says Harteveldt, is the fact that UGC, by its very nature, tends to be a bit more irreverent and freewheeling than some airlines may be comfortable with: “Airlines [have to] recognize that they cannot ‘direct’ or otherwise ‘script’ or ‘control’ an individual’s content.” That’s why it’s important for carriers to establish a set of guidelines regarding how its brand is presented. “I believe that any intelligent filmmaker would understand this,” says Harteveldt, “[especially if] they want their content shown on the airline’s IFE system.”
And though some have accused the airlines of being slow to jump on the UGC bandwagon, Harteveldt insists that’s simply not the case.
“I don’t think airlines are ignoring [UGC]. Airlines [just] want their IFE content to please the largest number of customers … [and] it may simply be a matter of determining that it’s not worth sacrificing limited IFE resources for [UGC].” Or, as Harteveldt wryly notes, it might also boil down to the simple fact that “more people may want to watch The Big Bang Theory than UGC.”