Online video

I’m continually fascinated by online video. Services similar to YouTube are popping up like bunnies all over the place, and they’re all enabling a really new form of communication and entertainment.

Big media has finally caught on to the fact that professional TV content is a gold mine online, and have started licensing content to YouTube (smart move for both parties) and, in the case of Fox, offering HDTV shows on demand over their own website.

But what’s even more fascinating is what’s happening in “the long tail” of video production. You have runaway success projects like lonelygirl15 (which is an amazingly good idea, and one that I wish I had thought of) and rocketboom, and now it’s understood that daily video shorts - be they news or entertainment - are perfectly suited for internet video.

This is clearly just the surface of the possibilities. As bandwidth becomes more manageable and the insanely inefficient task of serving individual video streams to millions of users simultaneously becomes easier, video services will expand and add new options. What if we had short interactive videos?

I don’t know what’s next, but I’m excited to find out.