The past two decades have seen a meteoric rise in the number of independent practitioners of the audio-video crafts. From its earliest period, a small coterie of independents came into being separate from the ranks of broadcasters and others who worked at inside jobs in film and TV. Over the years, that freelance category was […]
The past two decades have seen a meteoric rise in the number of independent practitioners of the audio-video crafts. From its earliest period, a small coterie of independents came into being separate from the ranks of broadcasters and others who worked at inside jobs in film and TV. Over the years, that freelance category was rarely seen as important, with the predominant working population of creative and engineering people found working in-house.
The recession reversed that. The ranks of freelance professionals, no doubt, began to swell in the mid-2000s as post-production houses began to slum down but the crash of September 2008 saw the phenomenon really take off.
When production and post-production houses shuttered their doors and broadcasters laid off some of their most talented and experienced crew, especially from within their news operations, the freelance trend became even bigger.
Few of the inside staff, made redundant and joining the freelance class, could retain the gear they were used to using. Instead, this meant that they would need to supply their own camcorders, editing systems, computers, and other equipment and that initiated a spending on small format camcorders, editing software and laptops, now trending towards tablets. This has led us to coin them the laptop video generation. Additionally, these freelancers needed graphics software, lighting kits, microphones and small mixers, bags and cases, batteries and chargers, tripods and cables and much more. So, it has been curiously good for the manufacturers, at least those manufacturing the right freelance-oriented — products.
So, how many freelancers are we talking about here? Theres the claim by Apple that Final Cut Pro, and its variants, are estimated to represent more than one million seats. And, it is pretty easy to see, given the shares held by the major Apple competitors like Avid, Adobe and Autodesk as well as second rank editing software and hardware makers, and we soon see that there could be as much as two million seats installed. How many of those are in the hands of freelancers? Perhaps the freelancers equal half, or about one million. For that matter, lets count camcorders and a similar numerical equation applies. With a consistent drift from seats within facilities and stations to more independent players, the count keeps growing by leaps and bounds. The freelancers are primarily found amongst event video shooters, and independent TV and film producers. And, the ranks keep growing. The phenomenon is largest in the USA but also substantial in Europe and the Americas and growing in Asia and the Middle East too.
Current climate helpful to both freelancers and manufacturers
The trend towards smaller and less expensive yet very high quality, generally all HD gear is aiding the burgeoning ranks of freelance buyers and at the same time, their existence is propping up the sales efforts of the many manufacturers of camcorders, editing software, computers and audio- video accessories and helping to compensate for weaker broadcast and institutional sales. This confluence has helped drive changes in small formats such as, notably, the widely shared AVCHD format and at the same time, put pressure to drive down prices fairly significantly, aiding freelancers even more, while at the same time creating a more fluid, if less rewarding unit-by-unit marketplace. But, as this was already an occurring change towards less costly gear a decade or more ago, it helps prop up the sales unit volumes, if not so much the dollars, overall.
