Video has been in entrepreneurial activities a lot lately. Interesting companies are emerging and big media and related companies are struggling to decide how they want to deal with the rapid changes that are happening. An interesting article in this area is in knowledge@wharton. This article discusses the state of emerging companies and talks about fuzzy business models. Some important points mentioned are quoted here.
So why is the growth of online video on fast forward now? For starters, broadband access is prevalent and media companies — including ABC, CBS and NBC — are jumping headfirst into digital distribution. Whitehouse also notes that amateur content — consumers sharing their own personal videos on the web — has ballooned as well. Indeed, prior to these deals, sites like YouTube and Guba presented mostly user-uploaded videos — either material the users created themselves or digitally captured content from television or elsewhere.
Flash technology has been a key factor in making video popular on the Web.
But making money remains a serious problem.
Meanwhile, advertising may not be a holy grail. Consumers may revolt when ads start appearing in videos, says Whitehouse. Online video companies will have to weigh the pros and cons of embedding ads within videos versus placing them on the web pages on which the videos appear. “There may be a lot of resistance [from users] to ads embedded in user-uploaded videos,” he says. But YouTube’s popular feature that allows users to place videos on their web pages may not leave the company with many options. After all, video displayed on another site can still use YouTube’s bandwidth without displaying any other YouTube content, such as ads — unless YouTube decides to embed them in the videos. “The same features that have made the site so popular may make it hard to monetize,” says Whitehouse.
I believe these problems will be solved because video is the most powerful medium created by human beings to engage maximum of their senses and subsumes text, audio, and visual information and captures dynamics. All absent in text and pictures.