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April 06, 2007

Online Video and Web 2.0 - What's missing?

Dan Rayburn points out in his Business of Online Video blog that streaming video isn't a Web 2.0 technology.  But while Dan's point is that streaming video has been around way too long to be considered part of the Web 2.0 "fad", I think the relationship between video and Web 2.0 is more complicated than that.  

The key ingredient of "Web 2.0" technologies that makes them worthy of that label is that they have open APIs and are freeform platforms that allow user behavior to define and create value.  Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee says it well...

...the use of technology platforms that are initially freeform (meaning that they don't specify up front roles, identities, workflows, or interdependencies) and eventually emergent (meaning that they come over time to contain patterns and structure that can be exploited by their members).  Email is a channel, not a platform; groupware is not freeform and typically not emergent; and knowledge management systems were essentially the opposite of freeform --  they presupposed the structure of the knowledge they were meant to capture. 

...so, to build a Web 2.0 service, Andy says, 
  • Build platforms, not channels
  • Make sure they're initially freeform
  • Build in mechanisms for emergence.  These mechanisms include links, tags, powerful search...
...and, I'd add, simple APIs for combining and syndicating content from one site to another.  Sites like YouTube are on the edge of Web 2.0 because of the ease with which users can publish their content not just to YouTube, but to other sites.  Web 2.0 facilitates video mashups: videos can be embedded across sites, search results can be published as RSS, users can "mash-up" collections of video with photos from Flickr and maps from Google or Yahoo.

But, Dan's right - video isn't really Web 2.0 enough, yet.  As Microsoft's Jon Udell points out, 

The kinds of standard affordances that we take for granted on the textual web — select, copy, reorganize, link, paste — are missing in action on the audio-visual web. The lack of such affordances in our current crop of (mostly) proprietary media players suggests that open source and open standards can help move things along. But nobody in the open world or in the proprietary world has really figured out what those affordances need to be in the first place.

Standard ways to search within video, associate a video timeline with other media, and deep-link into video content simply don't exist.  RealPlayer and WindowsMedia always did offer a way to deep link using start parameters in the .ram or .asx file URLs, but the endless variety of custom Flash video players (since there isn't really an official, usable "standard" one) means that even that simple method is no longer available on most sites.  And as for search -- while web search engines crawling into a Word document or a PDF file is routine, video content search hasn't caught on, even though the technology, from (the defunct) Virage, Streamsage (now part of Comcast) , Pictron, Podzinger, and others, has been around for years.  

So, Online Video 2.0 is yet to be born - while video is a part of the Web 2.0 ecosystem that generates value from unscripted user behavior on freeform platforms, it's not yet ready to BE one of those freeform platforms.

Posted by larryb at 04:58 PM [permanent link] | Comments (1)
Category: Innovative Technology , Personal Video Publishing , Streaming Media , Video and Multimedia Technology
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