Saturday, March 10, 2007

Not warming up to Engineering TV

Engineering TV
Don't get me wrong: I like the idea of Engineering TV, which is brought to us by, among other entities, Machine Design, a magazine I have always liked.

But in the early going, I'm not impressed. Despite the slick production values going into Engineering TV, I am enjoying myself more watching YouTube.

The issues are these:
  1. Most of the early videos are about robots. I LOVE robots myself, having worked with 'em a few years, but not everybody does. Which leads to...
  2. ...a marketing of this tool as being for all engineers, by default. We need to have some kind of filing system that helps engineers of specific types get to exactly what they're interested in. Maybe when they have a critical mass of material they'll go that way through natural evolution. Which leads to...
  3. ...a need to market the videos on an individual basis, highly targeting engineers in specific industries. They target their periodicals' e-mails that way, so I figure it's just a matter of time before they do it with the videos as well.
In the meantime, they're getting a lot of hits out of curiosity for the new material. Just like new Usenet groups used to. The history of the Internet tells us such curiosity is fleeting, and you need something else to keep viewers loyal after that. I'm looking forward to seeing if they have that something else in hand. There's a good team there. I wanna see what happens.

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posted by Ron @ 1:05 PM

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