Blog: The new buzz channel

Channelbee

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Ahead of the launch of Channelbee tomorrow (5 July), producer Chris Stott reveals the challenges behind launching a new station online.

Channelbee is a web channel set up by Tim Lovejoy and Simon Fuller to broadcast entertainment, comedy and music television.

I've come to realise one of the main things we've got going for us is also one of the biggest things pushing against us - if you tell people you're making original content for a web channel, they assume it's going to be total crap.

Interviews with people you've never heard of shot on shaky handicams with bad sound, and sketches that remind you of films you shot with your mates when you were a kid. That's not to say we haven't gone through that stage. When we started out a year ago filming stuff ourselves, none of us were properly trained cameramen and it was a little depressing how short of TV quality some of our stuff felt even if the ideas were good ones.

Pretty early on, I and the other four producers got proper training on DV cameras and took an avid editing course but I think the turning point came with purchasing the new tapeless Sony HDV cameras. With them came the realisation that we could make stuff look brilliant, sketches that look cinematic, and virals that looked almost as good as high budget adverts.

And the interesting thing was that when shooting a sketch that you were producing and editing yourself, it was much easier to create the look you wanted as there was no process of explaining to a cameraman what shot you wanted, or telling an editor in a vague sort of way to make something look more dynamic. You could sit in front of your computer on your own for hours trying things out until you got exactly what you wanted. You can't do that normally in an entertainment television edit because you don't have the time and the editor would smash your face in.

I suppose the best thing about having your own channel is that it removes the bureaucracy of television – endless meetings with commissioners, the show ultimately a compromise between them, the producers and the budget. Being working producers with your own channel reliant on nobody else at all means you can have an idea for a sketch in the morning, write it up over lunch, sort out the shoot in the afternoon then film, edit it and put it on the site the following day.

By lunch the day after that you could've decided it was total rubbish and taken it off air. It took Channel 4 over a year at the cost of roughly three million pounds to complete that process on a reality show I worked on a couple of years ago. So it's an immediate process - we can respond to things that are happening in the world immediately, and people can respond to what we're doing immediately too.

So the first question isn't whether internet TV channels like ours are going to take over from traditional television, but whether the processes of TV production are going to come to resemble how we work at Channelbee. And why wouldn't they? We have producers who can do every part of the production processes themselves, even to the point of streaming live events, and broadcasting our own chat show – no OB trucks required.

It's already happening in mainstream TV to a certain extent – PDs expected to film and edit their own stuff. From that point - people producing TV content really cheaply and the internet becoming a more viable and affordable outlet - will more and more creative people look to set up their own web channels as an alternative to going to a TV channel for funding and broadcast? We did, and if we're successful I bet others do too.

Chris Stott is a producer for Channel Bee