Sailing Off To A Better Life With Video

Posted October 11, 2019
Share To
 
 

Long time Video Journalst and friend Chuck Fadely gave me a fascinating head's up this morning about a great video + Sailing story.

Chuck is a long time sailer, as am I.  

He is at the Annapolis Boat Show this weekend, but I am not, sadly.  However, he sent me a brief note about an overflow crowd at a discussion of 'How To Make Money With Video On Your Sailboat".

This immediately got my attention, as it combines my three favorite things (not counting my wife), Video, Sailing and Making Money.

The star of the discussion, in fact, the entire discussion, was about Brian Trautman, a former sofware analyist for Microsoft who, in 2011, bagged his job, his career, sold his house, his car and everything else, taught himself to sail and bought himself a 53 foot sailboat and decided to take off.

Eight years later he is still sailing.  

A lot of people do stuff like this - at least a lot of people if you read Crusing World, which I used to all the time.

What makes Trautman different, and the reason I found this so interesting, is that Trautman began to combine video production and sailing- he launched his own YouTube Channel and then a Patreon funding page. 

 

In doing so, he has attracted enough of a following to continue to fund his lifestyle and sailing adventure.

Well done Brian! 

Trautman has so many loyal fans that he has been approached by conventional TV channels to see if he wants to star in his own Reality TV show.  

He has turned them down.

He wants to keep creative control.

And he does not want to engage in the kind of arguments and in-fighting that are the bread and butter (or gasoline) of Reality TV.  

The Wall Street Journal did a nice story on him recently

The sailboat Delos has become a 21st-century floating media business, a video-production empire complete with dedicated fans, T-shirts for sale, crowdfunding and a reality show that draws hundreds of thousands of viewers online.

“It wasn’t planned like this,” Mr. Trautman said. “It just sort of grew. We just wanted to goof around and sail. Now, this is our work.”

Congrats Brian Trautman!  

 


Recent Posts

The world of television before cable had been limited to 3 networks and a handful of local TV stations. But the advent of cable meant that suddenly there were 60, 70 soon to be 100 or more new channels. And all of those channels needed content. But where were they going to get it from? A huge market for content had just opened up.


Q: What do TV news and Netflix have in common? A: They both appear on the same screen. They both tell stories.


This morning, I went out early to buy my copy of the weekend FT — a great newspaper, by the way. I was a bit surprised to see that my regular newsstand, on 6th Avenue and 55th Street, had exactly 3 newspapers for sale — one copy of Baron’s and two copies of The New York Post. That was it. No FT, no NY Times, no Washington Post, no… nothing.


Share Page on:

Twitter