2007: The Year of Online Video (Part One)
No doubt you've seen the latest YouTube craze - even if you've never actually visited YouTube. A fireman and his new bride began their first dance as a married couple and, shortly after, broke into a well-choreographed rendition of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back." Entertainment Tonight aired the video on Wednesday, and yesterday morning the couple was featured on the Today Show doing an encore presentation.
Video on the web is ubiquitous and inevitable. As much as I do not think that every news organization should rush to throw video up on the web, creative video can bring more to a news story - and it can certainly increase traffic to a site. In the past year, web-only content has broken traditional awards boundaries - Tom Kennedy's team at the Washingtonpost.com won an Emmy, for example - and is starting to impact what gets aired on TV and radio. Hell, lots of us are missing shows on TV because of the web. (What, the Writers' Guild didn't see this whole Internet thing coming?)
A few years back, I wondered if it would be possible to go entirely digital. I consume a ridiculous amount of media - traditional and otherwise. With all the hubbub about how the Internet was destroying journalism on one side and arguments for why Americans will never, ever give up their TV sets and newsprint on the other, I decided to try an experiment. For a month, I went all digital. I realized that while I missed being able to read trashy magazines in the bathtub, I was just as happy watching shows on my computer as I was in via a TV set. In fact, with the amount that I travel, I actually found it more convenient to download and stream everything I could rather than rearrange my schedule to fit, for example, NBC's weekly programming.
Based on recent numbers it would appear that I'm not alone. According to ComScore, more than 120 million people are viewing about 7 billion videos online every month. That's an average of two videos per day per person.
I still believe that news organizations should be selective in what kinds of video they broadcast online. More importantly, every journalist should become familiar with how people are consuming news and entertainment on the web. I'm not advocating that every reporter at every local newspaper should start to shoot video - but it wouldn't hurt to get familiarized with the dozens of third-party apps, free tools and video hosting services now being used around the world.
In part two of this post, you'll find a mega list of various services, players, aggregators, tools, etc. for web video.
