Jeff Jarvis notes the bloat that still exists in mainstream media productions:

At home, I took the exact same script and with some photos to illustrate my points and produced the segment alone, in my den, on two programs: iMovie and VideoCue, a Mac competitor to Visual Communicator, which gives you a teleprompter and the ability to drag-and-drop graphics, lower thirds, photos, audio, or video onto your script so the’re all recorded along with you (no need for editing). I’ve used these tools before and had to brush up on them anyway for my CUNY class. They make it incredibly easy to make TV. Will my segments look at good as CBS’? Well, that depends on your definition of good but probably not. Still, the thoughts and the talking head spewing them were exactly the same.

So compare: probably a dozen people involved in my little 1:30 at CBS; one person at Buzzmachine World Headquarters. Networks will collapse from their bloat.

I haven't gotten in video at all yet, but my daughter has - and yes, it looks like it's not that hard to create decent looking content (especially if your definition of "decent" is of the "talking pundit" variety). I doubt that the volume of people involved on the network side adds enough value to justify the numbers.

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