About ten years ago I got the idea that companies were going to need videos for their web sites since people were unlikely to put up with wading through reams of type and would prefer to see moving pictures. If a national group had 100 local outlets then each one should have a couple of minutes of video to personalise them and introduce potential customers to the branch.
At the time the video production companies were not geared up to do this sort of work since they needed thousands of pounds to work on a job, whereas most small companies would probably only be able to pay hundreds. My idea was to do the job for about the price of a page advert in a trade magazine, perhaps £750.
Since then there has been an explosion in the number of companies offering to produce video and now some are advertising a £500 package, cheaper than the bargain basement price I envisaged a decade ago. Yet few companies have videos on their web sites. There doesn't seem to be much work out there.
Potential customers also seem to want a more polished and professional video than I imagined. But it is polished and professional in the style that they saw on tv 20 or 30 years ago. It's not what the professionals are doing now!
It seems to me that so long as the universities continue to run vast numbers of film production schools and there are relatively few opportunities in the shrinking tv and film industries, the situation will get more competitive. Not less.
As an aside, it seems doubly daft for universities to run film production or journalism courses. Firstly there is no point in them (other than financing the university) since there are very few jobs for their graduates, and most of the jobs that do exist are very low paid if they are paid at all. On a more fundamental note, vocational courses such as these, undermine the true purpose of universities as centres of academic learning and ground breaking research.
Saturday 21 August 2010
Wednesday 11 August 2010
Pennies from Heaven
I like to pick up pennies in the street. It's a really good thing to do. Bending down to get the coin is great exercise and it makes me richer.
Sometimes I worry about the possibility of picking up germs along with the pennies, but if you can get diseases this way you can probably get them from any coin no matter where it comes from. A frightening thought!
For the most part the coins are there because kids throw them away. They don't like to clutter up their pockets with small change. It jangles when they walk (which is uncool) and makes their clothing bulge in unfashionable ways.
Just lately there seem to be more coins on the pavements than there used to be. Strange, really, considering we live in recessionary times with high unemployment and a great deal of fear about the future.
The last time I remember an epidemic of coin throwing, a time when the minimum value was regarded as too small a unit to be worth keeping, was in the mid 1960s. On my way to school in the morning I could nearly always find a half penny (or hapenny), sometimes several. At the time there were 480 half pennies to the pound (this was before decimalisation). Now there are 100 pennies to the pound.
Does this mean that inflation has made the currency worth about a fifth of its value in the 1960s?
Possibly, but it seems unlikely. In the 1970s I was interested in buying houses and spent some of my time writing about building inflation. At the time (I remember) the cheapest house in London cost about £10k. Today the same house would fetch about £200k. That would suggest prices have gone up by a factor of twenty, not five.
Perhaps the main difference was the size of the coin. In the 1960s the hapenny was exactly the same size as the modern 2p. As a consequence it made more of a bulge in the pockets than the current penny.
In the mid 1960s the years of austerity (the hungry 30s, the war years, the drab 50s) were coming to an end. Today the economy appears to be balanced on a knife edge with global depression as likely as a new era of technologically fuelled growth and prosperity. But no matter what the future holds I'm grateful for the exercise all those cool teenagers give me by throwing away their small change.
Sometimes I worry about the possibility of picking up germs along with the pennies, but if you can get diseases this way you can probably get them from any coin no matter where it comes from. A frightening thought!
For the most part the coins are there because kids throw them away. They don't like to clutter up their pockets with small change. It jangles when they walk (which is uncool) and makes their clothing bulge in unfashionable ways.
Just lately there seem to be more coins on the pavements than there used to be. Strange, really, considering we live in recessionary times with high unemployment and a great deal of fear about the future.
The last time I remember an epidemic of coin throwing, a time when the minimum value was regarded as too small a unit to be worth keeping, was in the mid 1960s. On my way to school in the morning I could nearly always find a half penny (or hapenny), sometimes several. At the time there were 480 half pennies to the pound (this was before decimalisation). Now there are 100 pennies to the pound.
Does this mean that inflation has made the currency worth about a fifth of its value in the 1960s?
Possibly, but it seems unlikely. In the 1970s I was interested in buying houses and spent some of my time writing about building inflation. At the time (I remember) the cheapest house in London cost about £10k. Today the same house would fetch about £200k. That would suggest prices have gone up by a factor of twenty, not five.
Perhaps the main difference was the size of the coin. In the 1960s the hapenny was exactly the same size as the modern 2p. As a consequence it made more of a bulge in the pockets than the current penny.
In the mid 1960s the years of austerity (the hungry 30s, the war years, the drab 50s) were coming to an end. Today the economy appears to be balanced on a knife edge with global depression as likely as a new era of technologically fuelled growth and prosperity. But no matter what the future holds I'm grateful for the exercise all those cool teenagers give me by throwing away their small change.
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