With the explosion in online video, it’s a bit of a surprise that we’ve seen so few companies dedicated to travel vids. There’s Travel Channel which for the most part repurposes stuff that they’ve put on TV. There’s Turnhere, which is a fine site, but also hit or miss when it comes to quality. Also, their films…a generous term…focus on specific cities and destinations. Other than these two, not a lot of serious players have emerged.
Until now? (yes, that’s a question)
It looks like the former CEO of MTVi (MTV‘s former dot-com division), a gentleman by the name of Nicholas Butterworth (of the syrup dynasty?), says he is in “stealth mode” (meaning it’s not ready yet) to develop a new online travel channel called Travelistic that he describes as “YouTube meets the Travel Channel meets YouTube”.
Whether that sounds exciting depends, I suppose, upon how much you enjoy watching people’s lousy home movies or the Travel Channel, and whether you believe that a mix of these two things creates “synergy”, to use a little industry vernacular. Personally, I sometimes find the Travel Channel unwatchable, and YouTube’s offerings work for me about .056 percent of the time. But the online video thing is changing damn awful fast, and someone is going to score big in this arena, so we’ll keep an eye on this one.