Before you read this, know that I posted I was wrong the following day.

If you haven’t heard, Revision 3 has shuttered Internet Superstar, Pop Siren and Pixel Perfect and will no longer be re-distributing Epic-FU or Wine Library TV. Jim Louderback wrote about it at the company’s official blog with a post titled Changes to Revision3’s Programming Lineup. All of these moves make sense.

Pixel Perfect hit its end of life after extinguishing its topic of conversation. There only so many Photoshop tutorial videos that one site can do. You could argue that these episodes will live on as evergreens because the show doesn’t address the news or current events. Instead, the show appeals to the long tail. With over 100 episodes, they could pull the show off the net completely and sell it, but they won’t go that route because it’s not the current business model.
Internet Superstar will either come back in another form of show with Martin Sargent as the host. People love that guy, and the staff of Revision 3 have a pretty good lock down on his career online. I suspect that this show is being shut down for the same reasons that Pop Siren is being shut down, or Martin finally got a TV deal and can’t continue his obligations at Revision3.

I bet producing Pop Siren is a bitch. I bet it’s exhausting producing a daily show about different websites and make it original. The subject material probably got stale to the audience. Finding fresh things and people to talk to on a regular basis takes a lot of man hours that could be better used getting advertising or researching shows that are better watched like TekZilla. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see a PopSiren like segment during TekZilla.

If only to publicly acknowledge a friendship, I never understood why Wine Library TV was on Revision3 at all. If you’re going to watch Gary Vaynerchuk, you’re going to watch his full show. I bet they saw little to no traction with the condensed versions of the show and the editing time could be better used elsewhere. Or the summer interns who were editing the show now have to go back to school and can no longer work for free. Epic-FU has a community surrounding it, so it never made sense to put on Revision3. It split the community that watched the show. If Revision3 was serving the content from their servers, this will cut down on bandwidth usage in both cases. This means not having to serve the long and condensed versions episodes of Gary’s show and not having to serve Epic-FU at all.

All things considered, these changes probably don’t mean any job loss. I doubt that Bert Monroy was working full time for Revision3, and Martin Sargent will most likely stay on unless he got a TV gig somewhere. Sarah Lane has a steady job as the director of production and is ready to hop on any show at any time.

In the meantime, Revision 3 Beta is cruising along with content being created by independent producers for free or virtually free. Revision 3 can continue to epand by buying those shows a la carte and not have to pay producers, crew and hosts salaries.