I’m not entirely convinced that video is the future of online media.
Don’t get me wrong – I think online video is really cool and it’s a part of the future of media, but I don’t necessarily agree with the folks who claim that in the future, everything will be web video or mobile video or whatever. Case in point – I don’t always feel like watching your video!
There are a lot of times where I’d rather just read a blog post or skim through some photos, so when I see that my only option is to watch your five-minute video about a topic or news story, a lot of times I’d rather just find another source for the same information. This happens to me a lot on C-Net’s website, but most recently what spurred this particular rant was by encountering a tour of a very swanky room at a new Disney resort. I would’ve loved to see a photo blog tour of the suite, complete with commentary of each shot, but instead the blogger opted for a 10-minute video tour, and thus I passed.
Maybe I’m just a web curmudgeon, I don’t know, but for me it’s usually one of three scenarios – if I’m just casually browsing the web to kill time, then I don’t mind video at all; if I’m procrastinating when I should be writing or working on something else, I want short, quick bursts, in which video is not fine; and if I’m on the go, I almost never want to watch video because I prefer whatever I read in tweet or Facebook-sized updates.
And I hope this perspective isn’t simply because I haven’t really done anything with video myself. In fact, there are some avenues that I’d like to explore eventually in the future – it’s just not really at the top of my list and I still need to figure out what I can bring to the table because there are already so many amazing things being done on shoe-string budgets.
I think it’s more simply that I see video as another tool for the web publisher – there are some really cool things that you can do with video better than any other platform, but the same can also still be said for the others. When you’re a video-blogger, everything seems better through a camcorder’s lens, but in reality the key is to use each and every one of these new mediums effectively to best reach your intended audience.