The Future Of Online Video

Yesterday I attended a conference (Amplified 08) where one of the main sessions was a group discussion about the future of online video. There were people from all areas of the online industry from the BBC & Reuters to start up companies and freelancers. There was quite a heated discussion about the new IP TV companies and the way that the larger Old Order companies (BBC, ITV, Channel 4......) were dealing with the future of video online. However everyone seemed to me to be approaching this question from the wrong angles.

All the discussion and points raised related to how to move the structures that already exist over into the online domain. However, I personally feel, that everyone seems to be asking the wrong questions. The reason that Online excels so dramatically is in its ability to include interaction. I know from so many advertising campaigns in the past that linear video works on the internet far less well than non linear - allowing people to choose their desired content or make bespoke versions of other peoples work is what online users expect and is what the community feels is a pre-requisite in most areas.

What I mean by this is that people need to start looking at online video as a different medium to TV or film video as there is a wealth that can be achieved in new and dramatic manners that will engage the audience in a far stronger way. As one example - Adobe are releasing a new tool that gives you the assets (full scenes) so that you can choose how long you want scenes, which camera angles you wish to use, what sort of size you would like to render the video out to (depending on your requirements, online, TV, HD, projections etc...) so you can tailor the content to exactly what you want. This then runs alongside all the new technology that enables you to embed video or 'widget' it to your social network. Users can then make their own bespoke version of videos and therefore build a far stronger bond with the Band/Brand/Clothing range that the video is for making users feel part of that brand which is what they are doing with YouTube videos through their own conviction without anyone making anything new to provide this ability. What the audience wants we should give them.

This copies over into all areas of video for example if you are watching sport you can decide which camera angles you want ie: keep a close view on your favourite player. Or choose to have multiple windows open watching different views that you can drage to resize as you watch. Or have an action replay open while you still watch the over all game to see if it was a good decision by the referee. Even this example seems very un-inventive when you actually start questioning what is feasible with video online.

This mentality then needs also to be applied to other online areas such as Music, Text and as all the cultural movements within Art over the last half a century have been moving far more into 2nd level artistry than originating ideas and this is a shift that everyone has become accustomed to culturally. Therefore we all need to embrace others taking our work, bastardising it and making something new from it, feeling complimented that it was of a standard and style good enough for others to want to evolve to a new level themselves, rather than fearing that they might do something better than you did originally.

Ultimately it all come back to the thinking that "recording songs from the radio" never killed the music industry and when you can record something in one programme as you listen to it in another then this worry really does become redundant. We all need to shift our thinking into seeing these things we create as tools for others to use - in the same way Kraftwerk did for hip-hop in the early years of sampling or Andy Warhol did with house hold items. Feel proud that part of your work has influenced another into doing something similar and then take from others work and evolve those. As a wise Buddha once told me - "The amateur borrows, the genius steals".

So ultimately we need to stop trying to shoehorn the old ideals into online and embrace what is so amazing about this new media. We need to start to utilise these progressions in video that will lead the way in making online video excel at the same time as actually offering something new that means revenue creation, rather than doing something not quite as good as you could get from tv (and I don't even want to start talking about tracking and fullscreen that then pushes tv to the side completely and makes it increasingly redundant).

I personally think this is the direct future of online video and we need to start catering for it now.