Ah, good old public access, the channel where anyone could get in a studio and scream for a couple hours about the government spiders spying through their windows. These day, people are more likely to use YouTube or Vimeo to do that, and while it’s not an impossible dream to find some stardom that way, you’re often left to go it alone that way. Now though, a new media company is crowdfunding for a kind of hybrid of public access and streaming video, with a platform called NYC.TV that provides financial and technical support for New York City video creators, so that their good videos don’t get lost in the #content trash fire that is the internet. Also their Kickstarter has some fun rewards.
Per their Kickstarter, NYC.TV is aiming to be a platform to curate, fund and support New York City-based internet video creators out there floating in the web. Instead of getting a few YouTube thumbs up and a few weird racist comments, NYC.TV is aiming to collect what they consider the best of the hosted videos coming from New York City digital makers, putting them in one place and even helping support them with technical assistance in post-production and financial assistance in the form of grabbing some eyeballs and advertising dollars. In that way, it will work kind of like public access in that it’s open to idiots like you and me, but will be a slight step up since it’s run by marketing people who used to work at Vice, the New York Times and Vox.
Of course, just because these people worked for Vox and Vice, it doesn’t mean they have those companies gazillions of dollars. So, they’re asking you for some help to launch all of this. Before you scoff, they’re pretty upfront about where the money is going, and in a cool move, 70% of it is earmarked for funding the videos that people make. People like you, maybe, you’ve probably got some ideas.
So what are these Kickstarter rewards we mentioned? At the lowest level, they’ll give you one pixel per dollar that you donate, and make whatever silly picture you want with your purchased pixels and stick it on their homepage. At the very highest level, you can give $10,000 to get founder Kareem Ahmed to get any Wayne’s World picture you choose tattooed on his thigh. In between in all that, you can get things like a merch from beloved designer Mr. Kiji ($60), a “digital zine” that gives you ideas for things to see and do around the city ($20) and intriguingly, some kind of secret pizza picnic ($100) that will have special TBA musical guests. Who we would guess are cool, given the pedigree behind the project.
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