In the actual trends of online video, startups focus on many different and crucial dimensions of the video business:
- Visible Measures focus on providing a robust analytics platform for video distribution businesses.
- Seesmic focuses on bringing videos to our online social interactions.
- Blinkx is a leader in video search.
- Youtube is the emperor of user-generated video.
- Revver has pioneered in bringing ad dollars to content creators.
- Hulu is trying to figure out a profitable business model for distributing big budget movies online.
- Kyte empowers content creators’ channels.
- Veeker bridges your mobile videos to your online networks.
- And so on…
I see something missing there. None of those companies focus on changing the format of the video to create new consumption styles. If you seriously consider the way we consume media today, it is mainly through small screens. We prefer streaming videos to save space on our hard-disks. We have portable media players to watch a clip while we wait for the bus or when in line at the post office.
Podcasts never reached the heights expected for the simple reason that behind a micro-media format, the content was the same. People were recording boring 10-minute clips that had only 30 seconds of interesting content. Take Robert Scoble’s Podtech show. The guy gets to meet all the cool crowd of the Silicon Valley. However, sorry to say that, but the video quality sucks! It’s boring, slow, unexciting, with a shaky hand filming, an unorganized content… Scoble is popular so 2.0 entrepreneurs like to be in his show. However, I was doing the same kind of low-quality video until recently, and let me tell you that my interviewees were not really excited with the results.
My point is that Scoble’s videos could really hit the jackpot if Podtech realizes that videos need to be remodeled before being put online. Furthermore, instead of putting the whole file raw in their database, maybe they could splice it into mini-files, making the video’s content more directly accessible to the viewers.