“I don’t believe at all the road you travel in life is straight. I think there’s constant deviations. There’s all these little side roads. And you can’t be afraid to go down the side road just because you think the straight roads are probably a little more secure . The side roads are where you find the most interesting things.” Meredith Vieira
As broadcast careers go Meredith Vieira seems to have something akin to nine lives. She has never boxed herself into one format. Over the course of her career she has been a local news reporter, a correspondent for “60 Minutes”, a panelist on “The View”, a game show host for “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”, and a co-anchor of the “Today” show.
Vieira’s latest project takes her outside traditional broadcast television into the world of web video. This week she launches a YouTube channel called “Lives with Meredith Vieira”. You can see her first segment below which is part of a series she calls “Overshare”.
Vieira has said about “Lives”: “What I hope to do with this channel is give women a sense of community, a place they can go to learn about what other women have dealt with in their lives, and hopefully to leave feeling more connected and empowered.”
Future segments will give us a better idea of what “Lives” hopes to be.
The question is how many women will be willing to tune in? YouTube is more popular than ever with four billion hours of viewership a month, but it’s anyone’s guess how many of those people will choose to watch “Lives”.
A tech column in Time magazine earlier this year said the video sharing website is evolving beyond the popularity of bite-sized videos and that individual channels like Vieira’s are the wave of YouTube’s future.
Update / Sept. 11, 2013:
I have additional information about “Lives with Meredith Vieira” from Suncera Johnson who works on Digital PR for the channel. Johnson says “Overshares” will initially be programmed twice a month. The channel hopes to increase to weekly segments in 2014.
“Lives” also wants to make viewers a part of its programming. Johnson says the channel wants to share stories from viewers through user generated content including comments, tweets, posts and video. Vieira will be curating the submissions.
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