Future of Media Summit Blog

What do we want from video on the web?

Over the past week I have posted quite a bit of video to my blog.

Some of the video that I posted were in the form of vquences - mashed up thin slices of content - with fairly random themes - and some were full videos of pieces of content that I thought it would be good to share.

The ability to share, or socialize, video and to do it rapidly, seems to me to be in the process of becoming a serious part of internet activity. OK, I know this is not new. That is not the point. It is about our desire to share extremely rapidly.

Videos happen to be an extremely efficient way to transmit memes - idea viruses.

Now what we want is to be able to have the water cooler conversations that we used to have about the latest Seinfeld episode, about the hottest new video on YouTube. It may also be that the hottest new video on YT was also the hot piece of programming that was on network TV last night - something from John Stewart's Daily Show, a piece of footage shot on a mobile phone of the latest shooting at a US high school, a bomb going off in Baghdad or Tel Aviv...

These water cooler conversations are what enables all profitable media organizations to stay profitable. Because they maintain and grow the consumer engagement with the core media brand.

We also know that video on a web site makes that site much more sticky. I heard the other day at the Future Of Media conference that the CNet game site, Gamespot, gets user engagements averaging over 2 hours per visitor! I understand that YouTube's time of engagement runs out to about 20 minutes per viewer. Big numbers.

Since all of us have a finite amount of discretionary time, one would have to deduce that the impact of video on traditional media web sites must be huge.

So it is not surprising that they are rushing to include video in their offerings.

What they havent figured out yet, for the most part, I believe, is that there is no universal panacea in just putting video onto a web page.

The real answer in building an ongoing value in the relationship between media brand and consumer is to give the consumer the tools that will enable him or her to instantly share a video with his or her network of friends. An automatic alert that enables the meme to connect as rapidly as possible. And for the meme to be branded to the media outlet, regardless of where the underlying content comes from (or is hosted).

Surely the delivery of a service that provides this solves the pain of the consumer/user and the media brand?

However, it also raises huge questions about ownership of the underlying content, attaching a new brand to that content etc....