Apple cluster control is a technique for centrally managing multiple iPhones from one computer, without jailbreaking, without plugins and without dev boards.
This one answers: Who Makes the Content? Outsourcing vs In-House for Apple Cluster Control.
Someone in pet supplies put twenty devices online last year. This year he wanted to double the content volume.
He got quotes from three shooting and editing shops, and told me afterwards that it turns out the hardware was never the expensive part.
The hardware arrives and then content blocks you
The order gets reversed a lot. Buy hardware, then work out where content comes from.
Hardware is a one-time cost. Content is a continuing one. A device costs a couple of thousand and lasts two years. Content is a capacity problem you face every day, and when it falls behind, the hardware becomes a rack of metal occupying a shelf.
So before deciding how many devices, answer one question. How many decent posts can I produce steadily in a week?
That number sets the ceiling on the fleet. Not the other way round.
Three routes
Shooting in-house is the balance point between cost and quality, and where most people land. The advantage is that content matches the account’s voice and is easy to adjust. The cost is people, and specifically people with content judgement.
Outsourcing the shoot and edit suits a team with no internal production capability. You supply the brief and the product, they supply the finished piece. Efficient, with one hidden problem, covered below.
Buying stock material is cheapest, fastest, and the easiest way into a dead end. Ready-made material gets reused widely, and the same batch across many accounts is easy for a platform to spot. It suits a short push, not a long-term main supply.
The money and the time
Same volume, three ways.
In-house, the cost is mostly people and hours. A person who can shoot and edit, at eight thousand a month, producing twenty posts a week, works out at forty per post. But that twenty assumes this person does nothing else.
Outsourcing, priced per unit, varies widely, from tens to hundreds depending on the category and the finish. At one hundred and fifty per post, twenty posts a week is three thousand, twelve thousand a month. Cheaper than hiring, and no people management.
Stock material is cheapest, a few per piece. But the useful proportion is low. The same batch circulates across the market, so you spend time filtering, and what survives the filter may not suit you anyway.
On time, in-house takes one to two months to settle into a rhythm. Outsourcing takes about two weeks from brief to delivery. Stock material is same-day.
Which stage suits which
Starting out, shoot in-house. You do not yet know which content works, so you cannot write a useful brief for anyone else. Produce a batch yourself, use the data to find a direction. That process cannot be skipped.
Once a direction holds, start outsourcing. You now know what works and can state requirements precisely, which is when outsourced output becomes consistent.
When you need a short-term spike, use stock. Three times the volume before a major promotion, with neither in-house nor outsourced capacity able to reach it in time, stock covers the gap. Just remember that it is a stopgap.
One thing that gets missed
Outsourced content tends to drift away from your account’s voice.
The reason is simple. The people shooting are not inside your business. They do not know what you care about or what your customers care about. What comes back looks professional and is missing the details only you have.
The fix is to write the brief very specifically. Not shoot it high-end, but the first two seconds must show the product in use, background in beige, no faces. The more specific the brief, the closer the output.
Another approach is to keep the core in-house. Shoot the first post of each series yourself, then outsource the imitations once that one has data. That keeps the ideas internal while the volume sits outside.
Back to the person
He did not pick the cheapest shop. He hired one person who could shoot and edit, dedicated to content.
His reasoning was that his category requires a constant stream of new ideas, and testing ideas cannot be outsourced. He said the hardware can be bought off the shelf. The content cannot.
That judgement will not fit everyone, but the direction is right. Work out where the content comes from before deciding how many devices to buy.