Vlogging’s First Breakup
Andrew says she quit, Amanda says she was fired. There may be law suits, there will be more drama, it is sad, but vlogging’s first couple has broken up.
Their meditator, Chuck Olsen of Blogumentary, reported, “I’ve spent the last 4 days trying to get Amanda and Andrew to come together, but… it’s too far gone”. Squashing rumors flowing through the blogosphere, he states flatly that the breakup is not a hoax and that they were not an “item”.
News of the breakup was carried on many blogs, gothamist, Scobleizer, GigaOM, Dave Winer’s Scripting News to name a few, also carried by many, so called, mainstream news sources, such as Business Week, Washington Post, The New York Times and others around the world.
Andrew Baron developed the idea for Rocketboom, advertised for an actress on craigslist, Amanda answered, Rocketboom’s run of almost daily shows began in December, 2004. Andrew behind the camera, Amanda in front — this production team has been as fundamental to video podcasts, the new media of our time, as Lucy and Desi was to television, the new media of their time. Like Desi, who invented the enduring multi-camera live shoot for television situation comedy, Andrew‘ s (shoot simple-distribute through RSS-use viewer submitted content) innovation should prove to be a durable format. Amanda, like Lucy has endeared herself to an audience by playing up her goofiness, not her glamour. Rocketboom’s absolutely brilliant innovation was conducting an eBay auction for sponsorship - this created a new paradigm for profitable global media production.
According to Rachel Sklar on The Huffington Press, Andrew will continue Rocketboom with another on-air personality, Joanna Colan from MTV Europe and as a Rocketboom fan, I wish them well, I expect to be tuning in daily. Fans throughout the world should be able to continue with the daily flight of Rocketboom fancy.
As an Amanda Congdon fan, I hope to be tuning into her future productions as well. I’m hopeful that the breakup results in two or more new internet TV hits.
The very modern media delivery technology which had Rocketboom delivered to your iTunes, Democracy, or other RSS enabled media players brought Amanda’s charm and goofy humor to an audience roughly equivalent in numbers to Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Amanda posted a farewell to the Rocketboom audience on her blog, Amanda Unboomed.
Significantly, Rocketboom’s audience is world-wide, and the new anchor is coming from cable TV. This may mark a turning point where Rocketboom and the larger world of video podcasting or vlogs matures into a viable, profitable media. Other popular humorous internet video shows include Ask A Ninja and Tiki Bar TV.
Andrew Baron appeared on TWIT#57, The most chaotic of the This Week In Tech podcasts, recorded at VloggerCon with a high profile cast:
Leo Laporte, dl.tv’s Patrick Norton, Cranky Geeks‘ John C. Dvorak, Command-N’s Amber MacArthur, Weblogs Inc and Netscape.’s Jason McCabe Calacanis, Microsoft’s Robert Scoble, Ask A Ninja’s Kent Nichols, and the father of RSS and podcasting Dave Winer.
To me, Andrew seemed the smartest of this group of terrifically smart people. One piece of brilliance I recall was his definitive analysis of the ratio of the distance of the audience to screen to length of program (movie theatre with distance of more than 30 feet from screen to audience, the program’s length can be two hours, television, where the audience to screen distance is more like 9 feet, the program’s length is best at one hour, on a computer, with a 2 foot distance between viewer and screen, the program should be 5 minutes).
The super-star gathering in a very public and noisy venue, the panelist unable to hear well, caused them to be shouting over each other in what sometimes resembled a playground fight. Several panelist said things they, no doubt, would later regret. When Andrew said he used Jason’s business history as a lesson in what not to do with Rocketboom, Jason stated crazily that Andrew couldn’t call Rocketboom a business until it had revenue in the multi-millions and employed thousands. Andrew defensively countered with an exaggeration of Rocketboom’s advertising income. Not the finest moment for either.
I had that exchange in mind when Jason blogged a public offer to Amanda to give her any salary she needed, ownership of her work, a state-of-the-art studio in Los Angeles, production crew and travel budget.
Jason, whose over-the-top personality often causes him social interface problems, probably ruined his chances to capture hot property, Amanda, by studding his kind and generous offer with the crude statement, “You’re a star, baby, it’s time for you to be treated like one”. I’m sure Amanda, like her friends, read this as a red-flag. Maybe if he hadn’t used the pejorative, “baby”, we’d see Amanda as the face of a new Netscape comedy news offering.
Amanda on Gillmor Gang’s Syndicate Gang, Parts I, II & III defended advertising with the clear statement, “I like advertising”. The rest of the gang, Doc Searls and Michael Arrington, particularly, usually are more circumspect, supporting only unobtrusive, contextualized commercial messages which they say can function as welcome additional content.
Amanda’s presentation at SyndicateNY, was that of a media expert, even though only a little more than one year ago, she was a virtually unknown actress. That she could reach this elevated position through producing a daily show whose production and distribution budget is calculated at $20. per show, illustrates the media revolution taking place.
How many people in the convention audience and around the world asked themselves, “Why didn’t I think of that? No doubt, many are also concluding, “I can do that”.
We can expect an even bigger explosion of RSS distributed TV-like shows, with the few who came to mind when Robert Schobel speculated about Amanda replacements being only the tip of an iceberg threatening the Titanic of TV networks, Hollywood & Bollywood Studios. Nothing short of global cultural revolution is brewing. The sad soap opera breaking up new media’s first couple could be the story which pushes awareness of internet video to a critical mass of the global mainstream audience.
Exploring Rocketboom archives is highly recommended for all, fans or those hearing about it for the first time. Many wonderful gems there from classic Rocketboom. I’ll point to some of my favorite memories of the show:
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