YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley has posted an interesting description of his company's long-term plans and prospects. YouTube's (and Google's) goal is to allow anyone to easily upload video to the 'Net and make that content available on any device. He also makes a bold prediction that online video will be the "most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication" in ten years.
I would like to offer a counterpoint to Hurley's vision. While I don't dispute the impact of online video and its growing importance to the way people produce and consume media, I believe that online video is limited in several important ways, and will have difficultly competing with emerging graphics technologies that allow better interactivity, customization, and visual appeal. I am talking about sophisticated computer-generated 3D environments, delivered in a variety of formats and serving many different types of customer needs, including entertainment, news, and community. These formats will use advanced computer graphics to deliver photorealistic, three-dimensional representations of real and imagined spaces to a vast, online audience, and allow audience members to interact with these environments and each other in ways that are simply not possible with video.
Hurley is not the first person to predict that video will come to dominate the Internet. Mitchell Stephens articulated a similar vision in 1996 in is book The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word. It's a vision that still has a powerful appeal. In the past few years, a bevy of software, hardware, media, and telecommunications giants have spent billions positioning themselves for a future dominated by online video.
But the popularity and promise of video is overshadowed by several drawbacks. Despite the rise of amateur video and the new modes of distribution and discussion, Internet technologies have not been able to change the fundamental character of video. Whether someone watches video on a television screen, or plays it on YouTube, video is a linear, passive experience, designed to be watched from beginning to end without alterations or input from the audience. In this sense, video is still following the model set by film in the late 19th century.
For Web video, interactivity is limited to tangential content -- the text links in the navigation column, the comment field below the Flash video player, the icon-based ratings systems, and the offsite commentary on blogs and discussion boards. The video itself has none of these features. Objects on the video screen are not linked. An audience member cannot easily reshoot it, to make it more to his or her liking. What the viewer sees depends upon whatever lit subject or scenery passed in front of the lens, and whatever creative choices the people controlling the camera and editing the footage decided to apply. Yes, there are some encouraging experiments with online video -- overlay-style ads and links spring to mind -- but these do not change the linear character of video.
The failure of video to move beyond a static, linear storytelling device does not mean online video is doomed. It has a healthy future, as experimentation with formats continues and more members of the population learn to use cameras, editing software, and Internet publishing tools like YouTube. In addition, video is the best tool to accomplish certain tasks, or tell certain stories -- such as documenting nature, showing news events, and recording living people.
But it won't dominate the 'Net in the way that Hurley foresees. I believe a family of graphics technologies will eventually overshadow video and realize the true interactive potential of moving images accessed via the Internet. The technologies employ three-dimensional computer-generated environments that rival video for clarity and visual beauty, allow creative options not possible with video, can be customized according to audience preferences and situational factors, and can enable social interaction, cooperation, and competition. In the coming years, new formats, tools and hardware technologies
Comments
@Ian, nicely written. I fully agree with your take. I just can't wait for Holodeck to become a reality. Imagine the ability to be fully immersed in a artificial dynamic environment that caters to all human senses.
Ian,
Interesting take. I agree with your assessment of Internet video. The interactivity and 3D elements are more compelling, but a bit more problematic, I think. I blogged on this at "Network World" -- http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/32828
Interactive 3D experiences are already starting to take hold on the Web. Check out BigStage.com to see how video, still images, and personalized 3D models can be seamlessly blended into highly engaging interactive experiences allowing audiences to fully immerse themselves in online content.
Ian -
Thanks for this thoughtful analysis. Like you, I believe that video is way over-hyped online. I believe that it's mostly the result of old line thinking and ad people who wish to preserve their channel-centric hold on the media by making the web into just another channel for their existing video content and video creation infrastructure. I blog instead about all different types of INTERACTIVE experiences, both online and offline at http://blog.operand.com/. I'm really happy to hear someone else talk about how video is PASSIVE and not interactive.
Readers: Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I think that experiments in 3D environments have fired up people's imaginations, and there is a lot of promise for this technology. Once photorealism starts to make it into people's homes via their TV screens, computers, or game systems, acceptance of 3D as an alternative to video will increase. And, when some of these software products I alluded to enter the mix, that's when video will start to look really old-fashioned. This latter shift might not happen in 10 years, but I really believe it is inevitable.
Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
I agree - passive video is technically useless beyond the TV value prop. Overlay.TV makes it interactive, and we are working with a couple of people on integrating interactive video into 3D environments. Lets get it working together.
The reason I think the alternatives debate is not holistic is because our current real world (4D) environments actually have video in them and we definitely seem to like and consume a lot of that.
Thanks for the thoughtful and informed comments. I'm just now working my way through Stephens' Rise and Fall and find myself looking for some more recent discussion along these lines. Having just completed Postman's Technopoly and re-read Amusing, I find Stephen's thesis provocative-- except for that nagging issue of human nature and its tsunami-like capacity for subversion. By conceding that the "new video" is still new and in need of much maturing Stephens tries to hedge against criticism. Because he never really deals with the fundamental issue of video's passivity (see Ian above) in whatever format, I remain doubtful that the wise, caring culture he envisions can really result from the "moving image" revolution. But maybe that's a part of the reality here. The revolution is taking place and yet wisdom remains a stranger to the discussion. And ironically, the video revolution still depends upon the old world word to propagate itself.
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