Comments | ewx: Online video

ewx

Online video

Aug 27, 2008 12:20

I think the spread of online video is one of the worst things to happen to the web for some time.

There's certainly some good stuff out there, and spending the occasional hour poking around Youtube can be amusing, and there are things that just don't make sense in any other medium; but an awful lot of content seems to have migrated into video ( Read more... )

geek, comment

Comments 47

gerald_duck August 27 2008, 12:26:01 UTC

Agreed.

Other major problems:

They're resource-hungry. While watching "a video" isn't so much of a pain, it's possible to stumble across blogs (not coincidentally, blogs other than those on my friends list) where most postings are littered with embedded YouTube videos. They also eat bandwidth.
They don't resize well: if they resize at all, you just get the same amount of detail in a different space - and the aspect ratio is obviously locked. With text, if you make the window bigger you get to see more at once and if you read it on your phone you still get all the words.
They're hard to quote from.
It's hard to work with two videos side by side.
Tools like diff choke on video. Therefore, so too does anything built on them, including version control systems and Wiki.
There's no way of providing a link into the middle of one. (Admittedly, a lot of textual web pages lack named anchors, but at least the potential is there.)
There no way of providing a link out of the middle of one. A video of a guy in a suit pointing at a URL on a ( ... )

ewx August 27 2008, 13:16:03 UTC

With you up to the last clause, but I think the web is “about” whatever people choose to use it for.

gerald_duck August 27 2008, 13:29:54 UTC

Hmm. You say "a bad thing to happen to the web", whereas I say "not what the web's about". I suspect we mean fairly similar things?

If video takes over the web, and most people start using it for that, will you go with the flow and start watching video, hunt and peck for textual stuff or give up entirely? Will you keep trying to persuade the majority that it's wrong?

Personally, I don't even have any tools for viewing video or Flash installed on this PC. There are no drivers for the sound card, and nothing connected to its output. I intend to keep reading text for as long as I can, and will keep trying to persuade others.

ewx August 27 2008, 13:37:21 UTC

I think they are different questions, like the difference between a language and what people say in it.

Thread 7

sphyg August 27 2008, 12:33:08 UTC

I'm bad at reading on screen, so sometimes print stuff out (it later gets recycled).

simont August 27 2008, 12:34:57 UTC

Videos also exacerbate the problems with the tendency to link to a thing without bothering to say what it is. With a textual page it's not too costly to just follow the link and give it a ten-second eyeballing to figure out whether it was something you cared about (although even then I tend to wish the linker had given a one-sentence summary). But with a video, it can easily take several minutes just to find out what it's about, because of loading time, title sequences and waffly introductions.

ewx August 27 2008, 13:18:05 UTC

This is somewhat exacerbated by the prevalence of Youtube, with its opaque URLs; something more like the approach adopted by some newspapers, with a title built into the URL, would help. (And in its defence Youtube does have a title on the page containing the video - but there's nothing to guarantee it's useful or accurate and it's not got the same kind of visual prominence as e.g. headlines on news.bbc pages, to pick another user of fairly opaque URLs.)

ext_1903 August 27 2008, 12:50:13 UTC

agree++

The pacing is the killer for me.

jiggery_pokery August 27 2008, 12:59:43 UTC

There's certainly some good stuff out there

Agreed.

spending the occasional hour poking around Youtube can be amusing

Agreed.

there are things that just don't make sense in any other medium

Agreed.

an awful lot of content seems to have migrated into video where previously the same material would have been online in text form

Agreed. I agree with gerald_duck's illustration of other problems, too.

the spread of online video is one of the worst things to happen to the web for some timeFirmly disagree. The benefit from things that work best as video being available as video IMV considerably exceeds the (I agree with you, very considerable) disutility of things being presented as video which shouldn't be. My view is that it is far easier to translate things that are in video but shouldn't be into the desired form than it is to translate things that aren't in video but should be ( ... )