Launching ZBIZ.TV… a Stern Taskmaster

I’ve been so busy with ZBIZ.TV lately that I’ve been remiss in posting here on Bourland.com.

I’ve been on a steep learning curve, with ZBIZ.TV being a rather stern taskmaster. One day I’m dealing with grainy images showing up on the videocast. Another day it’s the audio quality. The next, it’s the premixer on my microphone setup picking up only one, not two microphones (it turned out to be a problem with the setup of the video camera itself, not the premixer or the mikes).

Audience has been a mixed blessing. I went from 500+ viewers on my first week to over 1200 my second. How many of them stuck around and watched the whole interview is anybody’s guess, but I’d say only a small number actually did. What those first 1700 visitors got is only a glimpse of what could be and what will be a far better produced ZBIZ.TV.

I wish I could write them all back and reassure them that I’ve cleared up the grainy video problems and they can now see crisp, clear videos. [I switched from QuickTime to Flash as the platform for the videos, and that alone seemed to clear up the quality of the picture, and made it far more accessible to a wider audience.]

But I think back to the early days of ClickZ when I was going through the same learning curve putting up a fresh web site every day, only to find out mid day on certain days that the text was rolling off the screen when viewed by some particular version of a certain browser. I’d panic, immediately identify where the problem was and rush quickly to correct it before anybody else had to see this horrible rendition of a web page.

The good news was that with every successive issue, the quality of the page got better and the content continued to improve. The audience began to grow more steadily and the rest is history.

I’m just glad that I’m making all my mistakes in the early days, before the audience grows. Otherwise they’ll never come back.

I will continue this story of my learning curve on ZBIZ.TV, but need to get on with some other things now. Perhaps later today or tomorrow I’ll tell you more.

See ya!