94 – The new wave in TV: Tom talks On Demand TV

Episode 094 On Demand TV
You can be your own TV producer. I’m going to tell you how.
Last Episode 093 Ty Brown is running a high touch dog training business remotely . . . he’s 2000 miles away . . . and its one of the biggest dog training business in the country. He truly created a lifestyle business.
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Our youth program is in full swing. We’re looking for young people that are doing entrepreneurial things. When I say young, that’s up to the early twenties. If they’re older than that, they might be a candidate for our regular podcast. If you know anyone, they can get in touch with me at orders@antion.com to see how to apply to be featured on an episode of Screw the Commute special youth edition.
Our on-demand TV channel on Roku TV is up. The first channel is “The Public Speaking Channel” We have several others coming. Brutal Self Defense, Protection Dogs Elite and various Internet Marketing Channels. If you have a Roku device, it’s a really good deal. You can get thousands of channels and you can hook up your Netflix and other favorite channels through the same device. I’ve got about $100,000.00 worth of free training on the channel and we’ll also be on Amazon fire soon but you can check us out on Roku right away at “The Public Speaking Channel”.
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Main Event
On demand TV. Normally I talk about things that are proven to have made me or saved me tons of money. This episode is different in that I always say I’m on the “Dull Edge” of technology LOL I.E. I don’t jump on bandwagons of unproven stuff. I usually wait until all the bugs are out of things and people have figured out how to make money with whatever it was. In this case I slid a little bit on this concept. Yes, the geeks have made it relatively easy and super cheap to try out getting featured on OnDemand TV so I couldn’t help myself but get involved.
So, what’s this all about. On demand TV is taking off like crazy because people like the fact they can watch their favorite shows any time they want rather than being forced to be in front of the TV at a certain time on a certain day. Also, there wasn’t really an easy way to watch an episode of a show you missed. You might see pieces of it on YouTube, but it just wasn’t the same.
So, in come places like Roku.com For about 40 bucks you can buy a Roku box and hook it up to your smart TV and get access to thousands of shows through your WIFI connection. You can even buy a Roku enabled TV so you don’t have to buy an extra box to plug in. You can put in all your favorite places like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime etc.
Speaking of Amazon. Alternatively, or in addition to your Roku box you could get an Amazon Fire Stick and plug it into another HDMI port on your smart TV. Both Amazon and Roku are drop dead easy to install. You just need your password to your WIFI Connection and your Amazon Prime, Netflix or whatever other service you subscribe to. You can hook them all up there in one place.
So, what does this mean to you? With a little bit of geek help you can put video content on Roku and Amazon fire. I say geek help, in that there are a few small technical hurdles, but nothing insurmountable and then you just concentrate on getting your video content on those platforms.
Just like I’ve harped on for years and in episode one of this podcast, keywords are critical to being found when people search for your topic. You get a big boost on Roku when your channel gets approved because they put you in their new channel section. With my hated topic of public speaking, I got 1200 people installing my channel in the first week. That blows YouTube away. It would take a long time to get 1200 subscribers on YouTube for free. More popular topics from people I know on Roku are getting 2 or 3 thousand people in the first week subscribing to their channel. BTW subscribing on Roku is called “installing the channel.”
Anyway, if you have or get Roku, please install my channel….It’s called “The Public Speaking Channel” …..see I used Keywords in the title of the show. And please give it a star rating.
I had trouble figuring out how to give a star rating, but you hit the asterisk key on your remote when my channel thumbnail is highlighted on the TV screen. Then you can leave a star rating, remove a channel and do other things. Oh, and the remote on Roku is cool because it has a headphone jack on it. That’s pretty handy and cool feature.
I’ve got other channels in development on “Brutal Self Defense”, “Protection Dogs Elite” and various Internet Marketing topics.
So, why should you do this? One reason is a large exposure to your products and services. You have to be careful that you don’t blatantly advertise your stuff on Roku. You must give content or you won’t get your channel approved. I feel this is going to be my biggest revenue generator. I mean just buying as little as my Wake ‘em up E-book will get me $20 bucks. My Pro Speaking E-book Gets $27.00, my fundraiser course gets $97 bucks, my pro speaker system gets between $697 and $997 and my full pro speaker mentor program can go in excess of $13,000 dollars if you get all the back of the room sales training. So, do I care that I don’t get as many installs as the yoga channel. Not a bit. I have back end products galore on my topic. It’s the same with my upcoming Protection Dog Channel with protection dogs starting at $20,000 and going up to $60,000.00 throwing up some video of the training we do anyway, seems a small price to pay. And of course, my Internet marketing Stuff can get me thousands of dollars in entry fees to my mentor program and up to $50,000 in commissions per person that joins, so I’m all over this new medium that’s not saturated like YouTube.
How else do you make money? You can sign up with advertising agencies that sell ads on your behalf and split the money with you. I expect some money to come in from this, but nothing compared to my back-end sales.
You can also get people and companies to sponsor your channel in exchange for putting their ads in your videos and/or letting them put an entire video on your channel.

So how do you do it?
Well unless you’re a super geek, you must buy a piece of software that must be installed on one of your websites. It’s super easy for a geek, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s better to pay someone 20 bucks to do it and show you how to access it. The software company has training videos to show you how to use it.
The software I use is called TV Boss. It cost me only $42.00 for unlimited channels. I think it’s like $30.00 for one channel. I would call it pretty cheap software and it has a few quirks, but overall it got the job done and my first channel is chugging right along.
Format, length and Ad Revenue
You pretty much want to use HD (hi definition) footage, but I had lots of SD (standard definition) …you can also call that older footage…..so we did a video procedure called “upscaling”. Basically, it’s video editing which put the old footage into the HD format, but it put black bars down the sides because HD footage is widescreen and SD footage is more square. Most of the original footage was shot with a pretty good camera and was good enough that even when upscaled it still looked good enough to put on a big TV. So, I was able to use a lot of stuff even from the 90’s that was really good quality training material and get it up there on my channel.
The 7 Minute rule.
If you want to get advertising revenue you must have videos or sometimes called episodes of at least 7 minutes in length. If you have shorter clips, you must edit them together so they exceed 7 minutes or no ads will show. You can put shorter videos but Roku requires that the videos be at least 7 minutes or you won’t make any ad revenue. Keep in mind I’m talking about Roku TV. I had a bunch of short public speaking tips so I organized them by topic and put several together on a particular topic to exceed 7 minutes and put them up on my channel. The reason I mention that I’m talking about Roku is because I haven’t done Amazon fire yet and some of the details might be different so I’ll do a separate podcast about that after I get my stuff on Amazon Fire.
Also, here’s another little quirk. No ads show to a particular person visiting your channel until they watch at lest 15 minutes of your channel and that 15 minutes doesn’t have to be at one time. People could watch three of your seven-minute shows on three different days and then they MIGHT start seeing ads. The reason I emphasize the word “might” is because just because your channel is now eligible to show ads to that person, it doesn’t mean enough advertisers have bought space on your channel. Unless your channel gets popular the ad agency you deal with may not be able to sell all the space available on your channel. I’m more interested in people buying my products and bringing me in to speak so I’m not too worried about ad revenue but that might be your only chance of making money so that’s why I brought it up.
If your episodes are much longer . . . for instance some of my full programs are an hour and 45 minutes long. Some of my webinars are more than 2 hours long. This means that every 7 minutes an ad might show or it might not like I said if enough ads haven’t been sold.
You can simply use Roku as your ad agency or outside firms are allowed to access 70 percent of your ad inventory. Roku reserves 30 percent of your available ad space for themselves. I happen to use Baron’s Media. I don’t know if they’re the best or not, but they’re easy to deal with and I can quit my agreement with them with proper notice. So, this is no big deal.
Branding
Ok many of you have heard me rag on branding and say that most people brand themselves into the poorhouse. That’s not what I’m talking about here. The term they use for the various graphics you need for your TV channel is Branding. Basically, it’s just pictures of certain sizes for different parts of your channel.
You have to have a channel thumbnail which is a pretty much square graphic where you get lumped in with Netflix and Hulu and what other apps you see on your smart TV. Then you need a splash screen which is what the person sees as your channel is loading. It typically has your channel name on it and a tip I learned was to put the word loading with three dots or an ellipsis after the word loading. This keeps people waiting instead of leaving if their WIFI isn’t too fast. Then you have a background screen which sits behind all your episodes. It can be the same picture as the splash screen minus the wording. Then you have episode thumbnails which are still shots taken from each of your videos. You need a couple smaller graphics too. None of this is too hard to come up with. You could get stock photos or just use your cell phone and a free foto editor like https://www.Ipiccy.com to make these graphics. They just have to be the certain sizes that Roku tells you.
So that takes care of your branding.
Some things you have to know about your video. You need the total length in seconds. So, if your video was 8 minutes and ten seconds long you would multiply 8 x 60 for 60 seconds in a minute and then add ten seconds so the total would be 490 seconds.
You need to know the total bit rate of your video. On a pc you right click on your video file and then click on “properties” then click on “details” and read the total bit rate and write it down. You don’t have to know what all these things mean. You just need to know the numbers. There are several bit rates. You want the one that says “total.”
Hosting
So, where do you put the videos? Most everyone says you should get a Vimeo Pro account because they are very generous on the amount of bandwidth you use for $200.00 per year. Even the very cheap Amazon S3 can get pricey if your channel really takes off with lots of hours of video served. Some of the people on the forums didn’t do Vimeo and got bills over $1000.00 or one month. So, watch out for that.
You also have to host the thumbnails of each episode. Your geek that installed your software can show you how to get the thumbnails on your hosting account and you’ll need the link to them to put in your TV Boss software.
OK. Let’s go over the things you have to have ready and handy to upload one of your videos to Roku. I made myself a little spreadsheet so that I can have all the stuff I needed when I open up the software and just plug in and copy and paste the details. Ok. Before you do all that, you need to get a Roku Developer’s account – Visit Roku.com and get a log in. It doesn’t cost anything.
For each video you need:
The date you upload it.
The title
A short description
The genre - mine are educational and some of mine on how to use humor are in both the educational and comedy genres.
The length in seconds. So, you just multiply the number of minutes by 60 seconds per minute and then add the leftover seconds.
The total bit rate
The link to the video. That would be from your Vimeo account or wherever you are hosting your videos.
The link to the thumbnail for the video
Tags are like keywords and end up as categories on your channel. For instance, I have the following categories so far. Most Popular and recently added are standard. I added “speaking tips”, “How to Be Funny”, “Speaking for Money”, “Complete Presentations”, and “Magic for Speakers”
There are plenty of other little details you can only learn once you get into it and watch the video training provided by the TV boss people. They also sell complete hosting and installation, but I prefer to be in control of my own stuff so I haven’t used theirs.
OK When you plug all this stuff in to your TV Boss software or someone else may have invented some other software by the time you hear this the software kicks out what’s called a json file and a json feed URL. You don’t have to know what this stuff does. You just have to copy the feed URL and paste it over in your Roku TV account and save it. You’ve got to refresh some stuff a couple times and then boom. Your video is up on TV.
One thing you want to do for sure is copy this crazy looking Json file and paste it into a document somewhere and back it up. It’s a major pain to recreate it if something crashes and you lose it.
OK so this podcast isn’t comprehensive training on on demand TV, but I gave you plenty enough here to get started.
There are two very helpful Facebook groups I belong to. One is TV Boss Movers and Shakers and the other is Catch the Fire both cover Roku and Amazon fire and the people in these groups are very helpful.
So that’s it. I’m not sure if it will be up by the time you listen to this, but I’ll be making a website TomAntionTV.com that will have listing for all my shows both on Roku and Amazon Fire.

Next Episode 095 Orrin Hudson, this guy is a former State Trooper who teaches kids the game of life through the game of chess. He’s beaten as many as 59 people at once while playing chess. Make sure you check out that episode.

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