TED is a “learning format” heavily based on a certain form of video presentation. Usually a solo “actor” walks around on a stage, and we see the audience from time to time. The stage is brightly lit, but it doesn’t feel like an academic setting. There are multiple cameras, crane shots, multiple angles.
But at heart, a talking head that does so un-interrupted by graphics and cutaways, for anywhere between about 3 to 18 minutes.
Although there is a “live” studio audience, a TED presentation is really a web based experience, with millions asynchronously finding their way online to “watch” the video files.
We care because it is learning taken out of the classroom. And because it obviously is a form that works. Simple, direct, informal, but professional, polished, and done with both art and science of knowing how to. Plus curation that finds and “produces” topics and presenters we want to see/ learn from.
PSA can learn a lot by observing closely how they have made this a big success. I don’t know if there’s analysis of what viewers learn, as in how “educational” the experience was, but it certainly is a poplar experience.
Yet it is a simple concept, and one that we might be able to emulate, albeit without the crane shots, the plush studio audience setting, and the sterling reputation that precedes anything they put out.