I always believed that video is the most dominant medium of expression that humans have developed and will replace text. Video subsumes audio, visual, and textual media and allows appropriate combination of these to express ideas and experiences. At one time, just few years ago, it was so difficult to create, store, and distribute videos that very few people could imagine that video could become a ‘folk medium’ for expression. Even a few years ago it appeared that it would be long time before video could really become a popular expression media.
First internet, then availability of bandwidth, and then explosion in digital camera have resulted in a situation that some people have started calling the next bubble. Well whether bubble is there or not is the market issue, the popularity and explosion in use of video is going to stay as much as internet stayes after the last bubble. Video is so powerful medium that people are going to increasingly use it. A very major advantage of video will soon emerge as a powerful unifying force across different language group. As people dubbed popular movies, tools for adding audio tracks will propagate and popularize videos across languages.
Last week video.yahoo.com showed that Yahoo considers it very seriously. On the other hand, as News.com article on this new youtube phenom says:
Almost every night, another star is thrust up on YouTube.com, the Silicon Valley start-up that began as a bare-bones video search site and is now, suddenly, at the forefront of this year’s grassroots Internet video craze.
There are some very interesting trends not only in emergence of new companies but changing of the way we have viewed video broadcast and cable business:
The site has shot up U.S. Internet rankings in six months to become five times larger than any other provider of online video, outpacing Yahoo, News Corp.’s MySpace, Microsoft and Google.
“The number of channels a user can watch is exploding,” said Mike Powers, a 40-year-old senior product manager at San Mateo, Calif.-based YouTube.
Broadcast TV offers eight channels and cable or satellite TV has up to 600 choices. YouTube allows a viewer to choose 10,000 channels or more, Powers said.
And I believe that what we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg.