Charlie Rose, the thinking person’s late night talk show host, has undertaken an ambitious plan to edit 4000 hours of archives into short Web videos under four minutes. While many of the shows are available online, in the long form, the project will involve edited shows into smaller segments for sharing and syndication. A library of some 800 clips will be available when the portal/syndication platform launches this summer.
Charlie Rose clips have been online for while, first with Google and now on YouTube where one segment a day is uploaded to his channel. The main location for the Charlie Rose videos is on his own site where there are some 4200 hours of full length shows reside.
The market for high-brow, intellectual online video is growing and there are marketers who want to be associated with them. TED Talks has impressive traffic and has been gaining currency with a big sponsorship from BMW. Fora.tv is doing well with a sponsorship from Chevron.
BigThink is ramping up. BigThink co-founders Victoria Brown and Peter Hopkins are former Charlie Rose producers. I bet they see a nice increase in page views with an exclusive clip of Angelina Jolie appearing in Washington this week at the Council of Foreign Policy.
To get the story on the plans for Charlie Rose, I interviewed Matt Rutherford who is running Web strategy for Rose’s company. We spoke last week at the Embassy of Finland in Washington where Matt was participant in our industry summit.
I’ve pasted below a Charlie Rose segment from his interview with Joni Mitchell, one of our favorites at the purple channel.
— Andy Plesser
