The problem is getting together the budget to make a good TV show.
I was ranting in #startups on freenode the other day about the cost of production being the thing that needs to change for the game to change. I've got a thought on how to do that, but it just requires a little time to see if its possible or still just a theory.
Would building an online service that allows people to mail in hd tapes, and then edit online via a flex app help? You could use AWS clusters to handle the rendering compute load.
1. Talent (although assuming you write and direct yourself, and use unknown actors, this can be brought down to under a few thousand).
2. Film stock and processing (over 50k with celluloid, but obviously digital is much cheaper).
3. Equipment (camera, dollies, lights etc.): 40k
4. Crew: 70k for a 2 week shoot with a cheap crew, including catering
5. Post production: 40-60k
This sort of money will get you a surprisingly professional looking 90 minute film. However, production costs on film are always eclipsed by marketing costs. It can cost thousands of dollars just to market a film to the distributors, no matter to consumers.
Obviously, you can make a film for much less than this, but only if you want to make a film like Clerks or In The Company Of Men (i.e. one location, shot in a weekend).
The way I figure it, the minimum number of people you need in any traditional production is essentially the cast and base operators (which could also be cast members if multi-skilled)
However if you go into 3D animation, this number can actually go down - to the point where you have a content production team around the size of a small startup.
The model I'm looking at could be described as a digital aniation studio, a "mini pixar" if you will, that uses open source software (Blender, Cinelerra) and homebrew motion capture (both facial and performance) to get performance across in a quick manner and using a significantly smaller team. I'm also looking at leveraging EC2 for rendering instead of investing in purchasing multiple servers for a render farm.
The model isn't scalable across the entire film/tv industry of course, but I figure it could work for a couple studios and this is what I'm working on trying to prove right now.
And if you're shooting a web show you don't need the high quality film because the ultimate medium is digital anyways.
But I bet you can lower many of the technology costs. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there's an extraordinary amount of inefficiency there.
And/or talent would be payed with equity.
Take Pixar, It's the highest profile of the 3D animation studios and can you name any of the voice talent for WALL-E? There was no "top talent" there in any notable role, in fact, apart from one of Pixar's 4 main directors (Andrew Stanton of Finding Nemo fame) I'm pretty sure anyone would be hard pressed to name anyone of note in a major role.
Now lets look at Dreamworks Animation, Arguably number 2 (even though they are more profitable than Pixar and also have the highest grossing animation film of all time in Shrek 2...)
Apart from voice talent in their films, can you name any of the talent in the films? Its a difficult task. The talent is shared among the many people that work there.
The reality is that voice talent is the "draw card" for 3D animation and is one of the minor expenditures for any 3D film.
So let's go back to Pixar, when Pixar was first producing their films, their distribution deals with Disney had them giving up 50% of the profits for the film.... They do all the hard work and only get back 50% of the money.
On that same business model, If you figure out a way to only monetise your film 50% of the the time and not care about it being pirated (even welcoming the filesharers as pseudo distribution/marketing) - you're off to a good start.
If you start reducing the workload on your animators/modellers (using limited cast/sets, animating more with mocap, scripting "extras"... essentially adopting a sitcom format) you can get away with doing episodic content with a significantly smaller team. Keep voice acting internal (even Pixar directors do voices on their films occasionally)... you're reducing costs further.
This I think is one of the ways out to cheaper productions and since online video has been notoriously hard to monetise - its a start.
I've also got a couple other ideas on ways to continue monetising off the model I'm proposing, but yeah, there is potential there.