Actually, the newest challenges have the potential to impact photographers, and other wedding professionals as well. Like so many interesting concepts, the business models I’ll discuss here started on the West Coast.
At least one video professional teamed up with roughly a dozen other wedding vendors to sponsor a DIY wedding video seminar. Their mission was to instruct engaged couples, and their friends, on how to shoot and edit their own wedding video. An afternoon of instruction would be followed by a “Meet the Professionals” segment, where the other vendors would be available.
While I know the person who coordinated this program, we have not yet discussed it, so I don’t know the motivation. According to the web site, the scheduled workshop was cancelled.
Places like Home Depot offer free classes because they know that they’ll sell enough product to justify the expense. Here, advance registration for the wedding video workshop was $49, and it was $69 at the door. Granted, that price did include a coffee break and a Wine and Hors d’Ouevres Reception. Regardless of whether the vendor partners made any financial contribution, this was going to be an expensive production. We haven’t seen something like this on the East Coast yet, but it looks like we could.
The other new concept impacts photography, along with video. There is a company offering to rent out digital still cameras, and those cameras are also capable of capturing video and audio. This is being touted as an environmentally-friendly improvement on the disposable cameras that have been so prevalent at weddings.
You can order packages of 10, 20, or even 30 of these digital cameras. They’re shipped to you just before the wedding, along with extra “eco-friendly” batteries. The company then hosts the photos and/or video on their web site, where anyone can access the files, and order copies. The claim is that each camera can hold more than 450 photos, or more than 15 minutes of audio and video. The images are available on the website for a month (included in the basic price), or for a year, for an additional fee of about $45. The photo and video files are then available for download-for free.
The wedding business has always been very competitive. With these two developments, I think that competitiveness ramped up a bit more.
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