Yesterday, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley shot off some optimistic predictions about the web video industry. He opined that ten years from now “online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication.”
I certainly buy that web video broadcasting will be near ubiquitous. Hurley’s reasoning nicely reflects my own:
“The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. Even more people will have the opportunity to record and share even more video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world.”
But I am not sure that I’m sold on web video as the “most accessible form of communication”.
Why? Not because I think it won’t explode – web video will to be massive by 2018. Rather, I believe it’s possible that some nascent comm technology may just zoom past web video during that span, or more likely, subsume it.
Spurred in large part by Barack Obama's unprecedented and extraordinarily successful new media campaign, other national politicians are quickly following suit by embracing YouTube's new dedicated channels for U.S. Senators and House Representatives.
Here's the official word from the YouTube blog:
As the 111th Congress kicks into gear, many of your elected leaders are starting their own YouTube channels. They're posting videos direct from their Washington offices, as well as clips of floor speeches and committee hearings alongside additional behind-the-scenes footage from Capitol Hill. And in conjunction with both the House and Senate, we're launching two new platforms that will help you access your Senator and Representatives' YouTube channels: The Senate Hub (youtube.com/senatehub) and The House Hub (youtube.com/househub).
Though this may not seem like something altogether world-changing considering the explosive use of YouTube, even among politicians, this transition to web content is a rather big deal for several reasons:
1. Selection of the Savvy: Just as the transition to television helped bring telegenic communicators like Kennedy to power, the transition to web video and social media will negatively impact those politicians that are slow to understand, adopt and maximize the use of new technologies. Suvival of the fittest politician will now require new media aptitude and staff atmposphere.
2. More Powerful Communities: National politicians have already figured out how to take advantage of fleets of interns (last time I visited The Hill on a video shoot Blackburn seemed to have 20+ interns at his disposal) that will work for reputation. Now imagine how that will scale online. Candidates who figure out how to build large communities of powerful supporters, idea generators and viral content drivers will have a big edge in campaigns and also in the governing process. Those that can grow the largest, most effective team (we're talking thousands of hard core supporters and interns) will first win the media wars and then the overall effectiveness wars.
This past June, Google-owned YouTube launched a new way to search for political videos on its YouChoose page:
Using speech recognition technology, the new function allows users to search for videos based on keywords that are spoken in the video. The resulting videos include yellow markers on the play bar to indicate where the keyword is uttered inviting the user to jump to that spot in the video. And if the user mouses over the highlighted area, a small overlay pops up with the phrase that includes the keyword, to provide some context.
President Barack Obama's video/web overture to the Iranian people marks not only a strategic shift in U.S. policy toward the country, but also a fundamental change in tactics better-suited for an increasingly connected world.
Now let's see how Iranian leaders Mahmoud Ahmanadinejad and the Ayotollah respond.
A new study from ABI
Research forecasts the number of viewers who access video via
the Web to nearly quadruple in the next few years, reaching at
least one billion in 2013. ““
“The rapid expansion of broadband video creates opportunities
across a number of market sectors,” comments senior analyst Cesar
Bachelet. “A wide variety of actors aim to gain a share of this
fast-growing market: not only content owners such as the BBC and NBC
Universal, and Internet portals such as AOL and
Yahoo!, but also
a range of new entrants including user-generated content sites such
as YouTube and
Dailymotion, broadband video
sites such as CinemaNow and Lovefilm, and Internet TV
providers such as Apple, and Zattoo
Sparked by increasing broadband penetration and rising
connection speeds available to a growing percentage of the world’s
population, online video is growing as quickly as the supporting
infrastructure can be built. (cont.)
I’ve been digging futurist David Houle’s new short video
collection on YouTube, mostly because he succeeds at succinctly
describing a variety of more or less complex forces. These are
useful clips that I can show folks like my mom to help convey
certain tricky concepts, much like the great acceleration primer
that Jack
Uldrich recently
posted.
In particular, I found compelling Houle’s three 1-minute videos
on the forces driving what he calls the Shift Age. Not only do they
serve as a basic roadmap to the change ahead of us, they nicely
convey the transformation of consciousness that will accompany this
shift.
Houle’s first video describes a trend that he labels the “Flow
to Global” which focuses on the notion that we are “beginning to
develop a global conscience” and that “everything is reorganizing
around global[ism]”.
Houle’s second post addresses the “Flow to the Individual”, an
increase in choice that makes us “much more powerful as individuals
than at any other time in human history”.
Yesterday, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley shot off some optimistic predictions about the web video industry. He opined that ten years from now “online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication.”
“