What the video web should become

In InfoWorld on Tuesday, the ever-wise Jon Udell has some thoughts about what the video web could — and should — become.

There was great rejoicing at Macromedia when Google Video switched its player technology from VLC to Flash a couple of months ago. The move validated what the Macromedians had long been touting: the combination of the Flash 7 player and the FLV (Flash video) format makes a no-hassle playback solution for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

We’re mulling this at Ourmedia. If we do implement Flash conversion and playback on Ourmedia for a much more convenient cross-platform playback solution to view videos, we’ll make sure that it’s coupled with easy downloading of the video in its original non-Flash format (MPEG-4, QuickTime, WMV, DivX, Real, whatever) so that users can download the thing for playing, remixing, emailing, and so on. Video isn’t just for watching, it’s for using.

In my earlier experiments with MP3 sound bites I showed how seemingly-opaque and statically-served audio files can be made link-addressable, and can therefore be quoted from in situ. Composing on-the-fly remixes is one of the nice benefits that fall out of this approach, but the larger goal is to bring the social effects we see at work in the textual blogosophere into the realm of audio. Linking and quotation drive discovery and shared discourse, but media formats, players, and hosting environments are notoriously hostile to linking and quotation, and I’d really like to see that change.

Agreed! Jon, I hope you’re working with the good folks at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunicatons Program, who are experimenting with annotated audio right now.

As with audio, so with video: linking and quotation should be easy and natural operations. When I noticed that Google Video provides multiple snapshots of each of its videos — a 3-minute video might provide six at thirty-second intervals — I wondered if I could tweak it to allow arbitary clipping. So I wrote a Greasemonkey script to do that …

It’s my view that every media player should also be, at least potentially, an authoring tool as well. And every piece of published media content should afford, at least potentially, a canonical address — indeed, a whole family of them. In the case of Google Video, the classic Doug Engelbart video shown in the embedded screencast has the unique ID -8734787622017763097. My Greasemonkey script uses that information to play back or download some or all of the video. Of course the same video might appear at Ourmedia.org or Brightcove, where it would have different identifiers. If we want to concentrate the discourse about media content, we’ll need services that can unify these various identifiers, as the OCLC’s xISBN service aims to unify the cloud of ISBNs that represent different expressions of the same work.

Going further, we’ll want the media we publish on our own sites to be able to use global naming conventions. As mighty as Google is, it’s no match for our collective hosting capability. That’s why I’m interested in the open content delivery network called Coral. At Magnatune, John Buckman is investigating whether he can push his downloads through it. …

Another problem that Google is solving for people is transcoding. If you want to opt out of the gnarly details of hosting video in multiple formats for multiple players, the Flash/FLV combo is a good solution. But encoding to FLV isn’t yet a widely-available capability, so Google Video is now providing that service. And while it prefers submissions of MPEG4 or MPEG2 video with MP3 audio, it will accept videos uploaded in QuickTime, Windows Media, and Real formats. Again, this is no reason to corral all videos into the Googleplex, but if freely-licensed and easy-to-use transcoders don’t arrive on the scene, that could well happen.

The Internet Archive has had free video transcoding for years — and I just heard that it’ll work to convert video to video iPod-playable MPEG-4. Now we just need a trickle of funding to get this built into a user-friendly UI on Ourmedia.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.