TurnHere brings professional travel videos to the web, but where’s the user generated content?
When researching about a city before visiting for the first time, it can be hard to get a sense of what places to try, and what places to avoid. Sites like Yelp and CitySearch can only go so far in conveying the essence of a place. TurnHere lets visitors vibrantly see places with streaming videos backed by professional filmmakers.
Similar in style to the recently reviewed Rooftop Comedy, TurnHere focuses on quick and easy video browsing, except this time, the topic is travel and locations. Basically, they hire filmmakers with either professional or prosumer equipment, and with a passion for travel, to submit videos documenting cool places to visit. Businesses can also buy shooting time from TurnHere to promote themselves.
This all sounds like a pretty typical film production company, but, what’s different about TurnHere is that they make all the films available free on the web, supported by ads. Currently, most of the videos congregate around New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with a long tail sprinkled around the rest of the US. Most videos are around 5 minutes long, and try to be entertaining while providing relevant information.
The interface is spot on, allowing users to easily browse videos in different cities. The videos are delivered using a flash based player, and they’re fast to start.
What we’re seeing is traditional film production companies turning to the web for content delivery, which is great for the consumer, since it gives them more flexibility and options. But, in the end, companies like TurnHere have not scratched the surface of user generated media (which is what YouTube is solely focused on). Not everyone can be a TurnHere filmmaker.
What I would love to see is a video-based Yelp. Alongside textual reviews and photos are user-uploaded videos reviewing businesses. I’ve already seen many videobloggers doing it on their individual blogs. Heck, I’ve even done a video review on my blog about a popular sushi restaurant in Palo Alto (don’t laugh, I used my dinky little Canon Elph). I believe that there’s enough passion amongst the video blogging crowd to make a very valuable video reviews site. Someone like YouTube just needs to provide the bandwidth and infrastructure, and we’ll be set to go.
