Short videos rule on net

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 06 September 2006 18:47

Opinion and Analysis

I just finished watching a 10 minute video clip on YouTube of an impressionist doing some pretty good impressions of some well known celebrities and some average ones. His Steve Irwin "Croc Hunter" was fairly poor but his Jack Nicholson and South Park stuff was great.

The point is my son dragged me into his room to watch it and I watched every second in a transfixed mesmerized state. It was similar to that two minute video performed by the cute Australian girl doing a rap called Crazy Dork and a three minute dazzling display of jazz/rock fusion guitar by some Russian dude.

The point is that YouTube gets 16 million visitors and counting a month to watch this stuff. They don't get visitors expecting to see the internet edition of War and Peace.

It should come as no surprise that an AP poll found that most internet users visit sites like YouTube to watch short video clips rather than full length movies or even 30 minute TV shows. The medium lends itself to short sharp bursts of pull information.

For instance, my wife told me about a 5 minute interview with Tom Cruise on Australian 60 minutes where the movie star had been particularly obnoxious to the interviewer, who was well known for his genteel manner and interviewing style.

I visited the Australian 60 minutes site and was able to resurrect the interview, which I found fascinating. Would I watch the whole of 60 minutes on my computer? No way.

By now we should have recognized that the nature of the net is that it plays its tunes in staccato. We get our information in short and sharp bursts.

There is just so much information out there that the current generation don't have the patience for long drawn out sagas when they go online. The longer stuff is for TV, video and the movies.

Having said that, I have actually watched videos on my computer. However, they were DVDs and my computer effectively was used as a TV monitor because our DVD player happened to be broken at the time.

There is a message here for Apple and the other would be video download merchants. By all means provide your download services because eventually broadband will be able to download videos in minutes instead of hours. However, allow users to burn the downloads to DVD because they don't want to watch movies on computers or iPods unless they're on a plane.