Mar 07
14
Dis-Aggregating Video – Slowly
About a year and a half ago, Richard McKinnon and I started thinking and talking about how we could participate in what we saw as the Web's Great Leap Forward. Video.
This resulted in a company called Perceptric Media being formed, whose sole purpose was to explore the uses of video online. This in turn resulted in a website called OneMinuteWorld and a webzine being created that was totally video based. Stories about dating, philosophy, recipes, sport all followed. All under a minute. All created with a very small team of extremely talented young designers, producers and creatives, based in Sydney.
Somewhere along the line The Australian Financial Review heard about what they were doing and ran a story.
That in turn led to the company getting its first customer - out of the blue – and starting to produce one minute pieces of content – initially educational.
The model was to focus on creating the best production values for the content at the minimum price: Focus on the script or on the performance of the speaker, focus on good graphics to underpin the message, focus on great editing, on inserting the correct meta data to enable discoverability, and focus on putting videos into as many hosting sites as possible to create broad availability.
Over the next few months we watched the views slowly build up at YouTube and Metacafe etc. And frankly some videos seemed to build a life of their own and some languished with very few views.
All of this was slow.
What is interesting now is that One Minute World videos are showing up on video hosting sites in different countries with specific vertical markets. And these exposures are because someone else not connected with the team has become passionate about the message or the content or maybe just needs to fill a space…. In other words, sometimes viral happens slowly.
Here is one place where one of the episodes is linked. And these people seem tto link back to one of the hosting sites where the video was originally placed.
The point is that more and more people are looking to use video on their sites, either because they just like it, or it adds to a specific theme, or perhaps because they are looking to monetize their google ads through have video as a pull.
All of this means that there is this very long tail of growth of video, pervasively infiltrating the web. It is going to see us move to a total video web very soon. And that will need a total change in the underlying technical rules that have emerged over the last few years with regard to video.
One of the rules that will change is that video will become clickable. Think about it. At the moment you can't click through videos like you can through text on a web site. This will change soon. And will have major implications for how we consume content, I believe. (Full disclosure here: I am associate with a company called Vquence that is working on this).
I couldn't finish this piece without commenting on the Viacom Google law suit. This really is going to be important. It will take our eyes off a lot of other things for a period, but in the end will actually lead to an ever greater growth of material being spread that is governed by Creative Commons licenses.