Slashdot | Are Video Blogs Ready For Prime Time?:
- "with all the far more provocative reality TV out there, who's gonna watch Linus recompile his kernel?"
- "it wouldn't be easily searchable or easy to catalog." Partly solved by mixing video with text entries.
- "I don't have to render a video stream. I don't have to do any editing beyond proofreading, and spellchecking. Upload is near instant. Download is too. And people can read it at their liesure. What advantage does video bring to the table?" Which is, of course, exactly the question.
I am thinking aggregation may be even more important with videoblogs than with text blogs.
- "Lets say that you produce a 10 minute piece a day, and that 500 people tune in each day. Lets say that you put your video in a postage sized window and it comes out to 1MB. Thats half a GB a day.
The current rates for bandwidth at this scale are about $1/GB of transfer. You will be spending about $180 a year for bandwidth for just 500 people."
To which I respond: 4 US$ a day for 100.000 people is two beers. Change your videoblogging style. And some of the new P2P technologies will help.
ipowerweb has a good bandwidth deal: 40 Gig (and 800MB storage) starting at US$8 a month. That's 20 cents per Gig.
- "the real problems with video blogging have to do with the nature of video (and not the problem of bandwidth.)
[1] Text is random access which means that as a reader, i can scan through someone's text blog and read it as fast or as slow as i wish, and instantly skip the parts I don't want to read. Video is linear which means that in order to consume the ideas presented, you have to scan audio, text, and images in order even if you don't want to."
Yes Yes Yes. That's why I'm trying to figure out the native language of videoblogs.
- "[2] While it will take you ten minutes to produce a compelling text paragraph with links and some light editing before you post, It takes exponentially more time to create the equivalent video "paragraph."
Good observation again. That's why I'm figuring out the workflow. That's why I say "No editing".
- "Video blogs will never catch on for the same reason people hate voicemail after using email"
Andromeda "is the simple and smart MP3 server for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It's great as a personal net-jukebox, as part of a public Web site, or over a private network." Might be useful. "If you have a basic Web site and are capable of copying MP3s and the Andromeda script (PHP or ASP) into a folder on your server, you can offer streaming or downloadable music on the Internet." It's a (free for evalutation, $35) PHP script. It can be configured to work with RealMedia. How about Quicktime? Not sure what the advantage really is though?
- "Video isn't the best suited medium for blogging for a number of reasons: it's very hard to skip around in to find what you want, it's a bandwidth hog compared to text or even audio, many Internet-specific nuances are lost (the lack of links is the most glaring of these, although the fact that nobody can say "^_^" is an upside), and very few of us actually have engaging personae in real life."
Again - that's why we need to find that language.
- "It would interesting to see video clips that people had captured from television or movies and analyze (in traditional text), or the clips edit together in illuminating ways ("here's a montage of shots from all the movies that feature James Cameron's recurring foot stepping onto ground/crushing object scene"). "