Here is an interesting article on how some of the largest talent agencies are beginning to see the opportunity of web video talent. From this past weekend’s NY Times:

“One of Hollywood’s top five talent agencies has created an online unit devoted to scouting out up-and-coming creators of Internet content — particularly video — and finding work for them in Web-based advertising and entertainment, as well as in the older media.”

It looks like the United Talent Agency is leading the most cutting edge recruitment practice among the larger agencies, dedicating a small group of individuals to recruit talent on the likes of vlogs, YouTube & Revver. This is not surprising at all, and I am happy to see that I am remotely on track with at least one of the 06 predictions that I had on the last day of 2005. My first one (and one of the ONLY accurate ones) was the following:

- Video blogs (Vlogs) will take off as quickly as podcasts, and there will be a rapid emergence of vlog talent and shows, a handful of which will rise quickly and become extremely popular. Vlogs will become one of the most popular talent scouting mediums and we will see a few folks get their own deals and go mainstream.

It will be very interesting to see how this type of talent recruitment shakes out, and I still do predict that we will see some of the faces we see online in many other places. Who will be one of the first to emerge on the set top box? (not talking Tivo either).

Keep watching.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Podcasting, Media, Marketing, Business, Blogging, Trends, Technology, People, Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: video, socialmedia, vlogs, talent, predictions, hollywood, talentscouting, youtube, revver,