I'm not necessarily talking actors/directors heavy stuff.
Up till now there has been a maxim. If it's on TV, it's making a substantial amount of money. If it's wasn't, it wouldn't be on TV. The result is that the cost of producing TV shows experienced very little downward pressure. There has never been good reason to take advantage of opportunities to make TV shows cheaply. That means there might be things that could have developed that haven't.
What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary materials such as other lectures or pieces of documentaries.
I imagine there would be patterns that emerge.
I've actually been giving this a lot of thought recently, and I'm now convinced of a few things. First, lectures can and should become computerized. This needs to happen. Second, a simple video stream isn't going to cut it. What you want is several streams of various media:
* A video of someone talking, gesturing, maybe writing something on a markerboard. This needs a certain amount of quality, depending on the lecture. You could record it at a high resolution and distribute reasonable-quality H.264 videos, and that should take care of it.
* Slides. Darn near everybody has PowerPoint these days, or something similar. Whatever they use, it can generally be coerced into PDF format. How you actually send out the slides to viewers is a separate matter -- you might render them to PNG on your server so they don't have to fire up PDF software locally -- but you should have slides in a clear format that doesn't depend on a video stream being intelligible. No more "shaky camera looking at a projector screen" crap. Even Google Tech Talks has this problem, because they're still hampered by the just-a-video-stream model.
* Table of contents. Have an outline of the subjects covered, so that people can skip around in the lecture and watch it out of order. It's the Internet way!
* Supplementary material, as HTML. If the speaker is talking about TRIACs, have a link to the Wikipedia page on TRIACs in the slides. Have all links from the slides open up in a new tab, and have the browser window (or an iframe, or whatever) be alongside the video stream. This would be crazy nonlinear, but that's a good thing.
* On the subject of tabbed browsing: have an equivalent of it for watching lecture videos. When the user opens up a new tab, pause the tab they were watching and duplicate all its state in a new tab. This way people can watch multiple parts of the same lecture (or, hell, even different lectures) at the same time. Remember the Wikipedia effect? Here's a succinct summary:
People will literally click around reading wikipedia pages for hours, but that just wouldn't happen without the extremely interlinked, hypertextual, ADD-inducing format of Wikipedia. Imagine what school would be like if lectures could be made minimally painful like that.
And of course you would want to make all the content available in multiple ways. Maybe have a desktop program for maximum slickness, a Flash-and-HTML version for people wanting quick web-based enlightenment, and an Android-based version for cell phones with a revamped UI.
But really, I was just think along a more basic line. A way to take in a lecture & (quickly & easily) produce a web-video based documentary.
IE take a lecture. Slap the notes legibly on a split screen & let users to jump around via a table of content. Links could be good. Maybe even sprinkle in some stock photos or stock video to break up the monotony of staring at a lecturer for an hour.
http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/
The ability to see the slides on the split screen and jump to previous slides via the table of contents really helped me as a user much.
sketerpot' comment is all over this.
sketerpot's comments are great, but I'm a pessimist. With current tools it would take too much work from the lecturer to make truly good videos. My point was that at a bare minimum if you somehow could make what's appearing on the board visible in the video, you'd at least make the experience as useful as being in the class. As it stands now, you're better off just listening to the audio.
However, there's a lot of room for technical innovation. Software to help automate the production work needed to make good lecture videos would be a cool startup idea.
