Video Killed the Webpage Star

Let me digress a bit before getting on to the point of today's entry. MTV started August 1, 1981 with the video Video Killed The Radio Star by the British band, The Buggles.

The song itself is rather insightful making it a good choice for the first video. Basically, the song is about a change in emphasis from radio to television, and that some stars weren't able to make the transition. It could be seen as a statement about music videos.

The novelty of the music video lead to a lot of creative artists in the first decade, but you don't see that many new videos these days. MTV and VH-1 simply couldn't hold people's attentions watching videos.

Eventually, both stations had to abandon showing videos and go to reality and game shows, or in VH-1's case, shows about the 70s and 80s, appealing to nostalgia buffs. MTV was perhaps as instrumental as any in producing the reality TV show, even if Survivor was the one that made it the format take off.

Instead of talking about music videos, which still occasionally produces highly creative art (see Feel Good, Inc by the Gorillaz), I want to talk about putting video out for all to see.

While most of the talk is on Google Video, there's also You Tube. Both allow people to post up videos, I believe, for free (I have no idea how they manage this).

The question is what will come of this. Will people put good stuff on there? Already, I've seen a few videos that are, well, if not good, then better than what you used to be able to do with video. People now edit somewhat better, can overlay what they do with music, but usually, these videos are a step above home videos, often made without professional actors, or for that matter, a script. It's a person taking a camera, and filming stuff.

Such video sites give free distribution, but what if you want to make money off of it? Or to maintain some intellectual property. Does this do it?

And to gaze into the crystal ball more deeply, is this something people care about? Right now, instead of sending jokes, people may send a link to a site with a funny or unusual video. For example, there's this video called "Matrix Ping Pong". It appears to be this Japanese game show of sorts, where these two guys are pretending to play ping pong. It's not really a ping pong, but a guy holding a stick with something that resembles a ball.

Assistants dressed in black maneuver the two players, so it appears as if they are defying gravity. While it's obvious enough that they aren't, it's still awfully creative. Someone tapes this, puts it up at a website, and tells their friends about it.

The next step, really, is convincing content providers to put stuff on there. Original TV programming, for example. Will people prefer to watch programming off the web.

The first key, really, was to make this video watchable on the web without the usually jittery behavior that sometimes comes from a streaming feed. Both Google and You Tube seem to have done a reasonably good job, provided you have a fast enough connection.

The problem, as it now stands, is organizing this content, and deciding what to watch. Until real content arrives, and until it becomes exclusively available in this medium, and until it becomes easy to figure out what to watch, these services will be novelties. However, there's a sense that Google does not want this to be a pure novelty.

Google has come up with unusual strategies to push its own business. Rather than think of the traditional forms of software, e.g., office software or presentation software, they've looked to search, blogging, and now video distribution as ways of branching out.

They came about the problem sideways, trying to figure out what kind of services people wanted from the web. Not everything they've done has turned to gold. For example, Blogger, while successful, appears to be overtaken by MySpace.

GTalk is not the most widely used IM, as far as I know. I barely use Froogle for anything.

Still, they have more hits than misses, and all without users having to spend money, which is really the most amazing part of it all. Although I'm sure that will change (and perhaps some stuff already requires money), it shows a highly unusual view of the software world.

I think we're still looking at a few years down the road before we figure out whether this kind of video distribution will lead to something interesting or not.