Consider this recent post by clickz.com' s Zachary Rodgers:
The Online Publishers Association found more than a quarter of Internet users now watch video online weekly... With growth comes the thrilling comparison online marketers get to make with television. Finally, the Web competes with the idiot box in its own language -- video -- with audiences approaching cable network proportions.
Rodgers' take is specific to prospects for the online video advertising, given that advertisers spend only a fraction of the ballooning online ad dollars in the video realm, and doesn't address is what users are watching. But the OPA study gives this breakdown:
News clips, viewed by 66% of those surveyed, are the most commonly watched type of online video, followed by movie clips and trailers at 49%. However, sports highlights are watched most frequently, with 48% watching at least once a week, and 11% watching daily.
Thestar.com has dabbled in video over the past few months as we experiment with the form. Photographer Bernard Weil shot several video reports from New Orleans and other areas hit by last summer's Hurricane Katrina. We link to movie trailers for our featured movie on our Movies page each week. And we regularly offer Quicktime movies that combine narration by our reporters and photos shot by Star photographers - the latest being a short movie to go with a story about women and children murdered in a Mexican town, narrated by reporter Linda Diebel and featuring photos by Carlos Osorio. The movie was also offered in an video iPod-ready version.
Is video important to the stories you read on thestar.com? Would you expect to see breaking news video, or entertainment clips -- or amateur video provided by other readers? Would you use an iPod to watch video accompanying a story? As always we value your opinion so please share your thoughts and ideas by using the comments link at the bottom of this post.
I wouldn't personally watch video because of its linear format; I enjoy the freedom of scanning headlines, seeing whats of interest to me.
It's the classic scenario of watching the 6 o'clock news, seeing the promo of the puppy stuck in the well, and waiting 29 minutes of other things just to see the one thing you wanted -- and more often than not I miss it because I'm channel surfing, doing other stuff at home, etc.!
I think the solution may lie somewhere in the middle, offering short clips of 20-30 seconds, rather than traditional anchor-story formats. When someone sees a story about a burning building, he or she wants to see the burning building -- not 1-2 minutes of intro filler time and 1-2 minutes of outro filler time. Perhaps the best solution is to immediately stream the video with sparce commentary and accomodating text that allows users to quickly and efficiently navigate to other points of interest.
One last point, consider using Macromedia Flash's Video Encoder to take advantage of Progressive Downloading. I think one deterrent to online video has been 1) modems, a problem we are finally getting around and 2) the codec wars. Windows Media, QuickTime, Real... Web developers are still trying to cover their tracks, developing for multiple formats over and over -- and each only offer marginal benefits over one another! Can someone say the browser wars have re-reared their ugly heads in the form of codecs? We've already adoped Web standards (XHTML/CSS) -- why are we still running around with media?
I've used Flash video for a few projects and I've been stunned with the results. It's really a technology worth investigating, and the process is simple to the point of absurdity -- drag and drop your video file, choose your compression settings and encode. Plus Flash offers skinnable videos, no more having to "brand" your video permanently.
Posted by: Rich | March 06, 2006 at 08:47 PM
I rarely bother to watch video clips on news web sites, and I'm especially annoyed when an intriguing headline leads *only* to a video, with no accompanying story (a common tactic on cnn.com). Every site seems to use different formats, and many require download and install of their own proprietary browser plugins to encapsulate the video. Many sites also append ads to the beginning of the videos.
If I want to passively absorb the news, streamed at me in a video format, I can do so by turning on my television.
I don't understand why so many web site publishers seem to want to turn my internet browser into a TV as well. It takes control and choice of content away from the web site visitor and hands it back to the publisher. It's a step backwards, in my opinion, and ignores what made the web so popular in the first place.
Posted by: Gary | March 07, 2006 at 01:52 PM