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Should Studios Use YouTube like a Development League?
Story originally seen on vincenzolandino.com
A development league allows you to groom talent for the professional stage. Professional sports leagues are a perfect example of this type of system at work: Each major sport in the U.S. is fed players from the NCAA collegiate ranks with such certainty that they hold drafts in order to claim the rising talent.
This certainty is key to promoting each league’s brand and provides a better professional product on the field. When the average franchise value of a U.S. professional sports team is $1.5 billion, it’s hard to argue against the success of such a system.
Why haven’t other entertainment industries followed the development league model? Because the space is not only new, but also changing quite rapidly. Users upload more video content in 30 days than the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years. This is an area of incredible potential for major networks and studios to use online video sources like YouTube as a “development league” to feed their high-quality productions.
While the idea of a development league may sound appealing at first glance, there a couple of reasons it may not be as smart a play as major networks and studios think. Here are some arguments for and against the idea and an overview of where the…
