Online video

[ewx]

I think the spread of online video is one of the worst things to happen to the web for some time.

There's certainly some good stuff out there, and spending the occasional hour poking around Youtube can be amusing, and there are things that just don't make sense in any other medium; but an awful lot of content seems to have migrated into video where previously the same material would have been online in text form - you don't get the notes of someone's presentation online, you just get the video.

To my mind the three biggest disadvantages of video over an article, or a transcript, or even just a decent set of slides, are:

• They dictate pacing. You can read at any pace you like, with a video you're stuck with the pacing its creator chose, and at least for me inevitably limited to a rather slower pace than I can read at. This isn't just about normal reading speed, you can skim text in a way that's rather difficult with a video.
• They have sound. A nuisance in a shared environment or if you wanted to do something else with your ears (listen to background music or for a knock at the door, for instance).
• Interruption is costly. If something interrupts reading text you can 'passively' stop, and when you return to it you can just scan back up a bit for enough context to get going again. If something interrupts watching a video you have to actively find the pause button, and if you wanted to pick up context when returning to it you have to fiddle with the rewind controls (which might well be a not-big-enough slider, but that's an implementation detail).

You can't print them out either, but I almost never print anything out to read it, so that one's pretty much moot from my point of view.

Comments

[liv]

Agreed entirely. If you're trying to convey information, video is a terrible medium. And web video is particularly bad, because as well as the disruptive sound thing, you have to choose between tiny video with awful quality, or something utterly unreasonably greedy for bandwidth even in these days where a lot of people don't really count these things.

There are lots of things that video is good for; if you're trying to show a dynamic visual effect, then it's almost by definition the optimal medium. I really hate it when news sites show videos of a newsreader telling you the news, instead of a text article, though, and that's only the most prominent example.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The quality and resource usage questions don't really bother me; they could indeed be much better in some cases but quite often they're already up to the job, and presumably will improve over time in any case; like the poor rewind controls, an implementation detail.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Also you have to have whatever thingwotsit they are using (usually Flash).

[shortcipher]

I think HTML 5 is supposed to contain a(nother) way to embed video without using Flash, hopefully offering people whatever it is they think they need that OBJECT doesn't provide. This has the added benefit of providing the same player UI for all sites, perhaps customisable by the user, rather than a billion different dodgy Flash-based players, each with their own bugs.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

An effort somewhat sabotaged by Nokia, as I recall...

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

I can understand Bokia et al's sabotage, as long as submarine patents exist mandating a format like Ogg Theora is always going to give companies the fear, look at what happened with gif.

Having a standard <video> element is still a good thing, it's sat there in the DOM with a standard interface for doing things to it, it can be styled along with everything else, and it will save things like the iPhone having to either work out that an attempt to embed some flash is really a link to a video over there, or dig through the flash itself to find the link.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

They also lack any sensible search function. Often if I look at a web page, I'll really just want the one paragraph that answers my question. That's impossible with a video.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

And of course, they're not terribly accessible either for reasons of disability or technical limitation.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

It has belatedly occurred to me that listening to the soundtrack of a video is probably more agreeable than listening to a screen-reader, so this point is somewhat diluted.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Google have done some stuff towards auto-transcribing and searching videos (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/in-their-own-words-political-videos.html), but there's still a long way to go.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

ooh, interesting :)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Good point.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Completely agree with you.

[Oddly, when robhu was discussing use of videos, one of his plus points over the text was that the video had convincing sounding people (that is, it had real voices that spoke in a convincing, engaging and authorative sort of way, and so was more likely to convert us to christianity) That really annoys me. OK, there is less tone of voice in written media. But if you're nominally conveying facts, you shouldn't need tone of voice to make them seem convincing.]

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That seems like a fundamentally anti-intellectual position (on his part); if an important argument cannot stand on its own, then it ought to fall, rather than survive on cosmetic details.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Hemm maybe he didn't go quite as far as I am claiming (http://robhu.livejournal.com/637968.html), he just says 'there is value in body language and tone that alters the content of just the text.' Maybe it was my annoyance at videos jumping to fill in the gaps.

[sparrowsion]

There's also negative value in having the pedagogical and presentational skills of a decomposing sloth when you're clogging YouTube up with your "tutorial"1. Insisting on text, or even slides, increases the chances of getting a competent rendering.

1 This micro-rantulette brough to you courtesy of 1ngi's attempts to find an introduction to iMovie 06.

[simont]

That certainly seems like a much more reasonable claim. In particular, tone of voice can often disambiguate possible interpretations of a sentence which might be hard to choose between given just the words in text. Irony and sarcasm are one obvious such area, but there are more subtle cases too, such as emphasis – a de-emphasis of some particular word might indicate that it was intended as an illustrative example of the main assertion and not a constraint on its applicability.

Of course you can re-word to compensate for things like that, if you're trying to produce an equivalent piece of text, but it might come over very badly in a literal transcript.

[gerald_duck]

Thank you; you've just reminded me to post something I've had sitting in my stack for a while.

It appears you and robhu have swapped gender rôles. :-p

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

if you're nominally conveying facts

But this kind of thing (proselytization) isn't about conveying facts; there aren't any facts to be conveyed. It's about making an emotional and rhetorical appeal, so videos are likely to be more effective than text, because more techniques of persuasion can be brought to bear.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I think that emotional emphasis often has a valid part to play in convincing someone of something - especially if the something is "I really feel hugely upset by X" or some similar thing.

On the other hand if the topic is "differential equations in 6 easy lectures (and 20 really hard ones)" then I agree that emotional wossname should be irrelevant (it's not irrelevant it's a hippopotamus).

[imc.livejournal.com]

you don't get the notes of someone's presentation online, you just get the video.

These days in my experience you don't get the notes, you get the PowerPoint file, which is (a) bloated, (b) of limited use to someone running in a Microsoft-free environment (though OpenOffice is quite good these days, it has to be said), and (c) often barely intelligible without the context that the presenter would have given during the actual talk.

[gerald_duck]

Agreed.

Other major problems:

• They're resource-hungry. While watching "a video" isn't so much of a pain, it's possible to stumble across blogs (not coincidentally, blogs other than those on my friends list) where most postings are littered with embedded YouTube videos. They also eat bandwidth.
  
• They don't resize well: if they resize at all, you just get the same amount of detail in a different space — and the aspect ratio is obviously locked. With text, if you make the window bigger you get to see more at once and if you read it on your phone you still get all the words.
  
• They're hard to quote from.
  
• It's hard to work with two videos side by side.
  
• Tools like diff choke on video. Therefore, so too does anything built on them, including version control systems and Wiki.
  
• There's no way of providing a link into the middle of one. (Admittedly, a lot of textual web pages lack named anchors, but at least the potential is there.)
  
• There no way of providing a link out of the middle of one. A video of a guy in a suit pointing at a URL on a projection of a Powerpoint presentation is unhelpful.

Fundamentally, a video is a monolithic leaf node in the web, and that's not what the web's about.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

With you up to the last clause, but I think the web is “about” whatever people choose to use it for.

[gerald_duck]

Hmm. You say "a bad thing to happen to the web", whereas I say "not what the web's about". I suspect we mean fairly similar things?

If video takes over the web, and most people start using it for that, will you go with the flow and start watching video, hunt and peck for textual stuff or give up entirely? Will you keep trying to persuade the majority that it's wrong?

Personally, I don't even have any tools for viewing video or Flash installed on this PC. There are no drivers for the sound card, and nothing connected to its output. I intend to keep reading text for as long as I can, and will keep trying to persuade others.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I think they are different questions, like the difference between a language and what people say in it.

[gerald_duck]

As an adherent of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, I don't believe the two are independent considerations.

Bored with the Internet is one of my favourite XKCD cartoons, and having a camera in my pocket alters my perception of things I do and places I visit (possibly negatively, so I prefer to leave it in the car).

[ewx.livejournal.com]

When someone writes Mein Kampf in German, I don't object that that antisemitism is not what German is about - it would be equally objectionable whatever language it was written in. German is just a platform for communication. But if you were e.g. constructing some kind of survey of important German writings you might have well have cause to complain that it was one of the less pleasant books in that language and you'd rather have avoided it.

Similarly the profusion of video is objectionable not because it's violating some abstract principle about the web, but for practical reasons that apply however it reaches me. And a lot of it reaches me because it's because widespread online.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

"If video takes over the web, and most people start using it for that, will you go with the flow and start watching video, hunt and peck for textual stuff or give up entirely? Will you keep trying to persuade the majority that it's wrong?"

Regarding video as morally wrong is insane. It's not as if there is a finite amount of web and the video is crowding out the text. What you get is a contour defined by convenience, both of the sender and the reciever. This is why lots of talks get published as video: the alternative is usually not a text transcript, it's them not bothering to publish it.

I don't usually bother with video myself, especially not at work.

I think what we're seeing is a bit like the rash of "FMV games" in the nineties as that technology became possible. People using it because it's new. It'll never achieve even 90% takeup, and after it's less new people will go back to using it where it fits the convenience supply/demand curve. Consider mobile phones: video is possible, audio is the default, but people *still* use text - because sometimes it's more convenient.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

I'm bad at reading on screen, so sometimes print stuff out (it later gets recycled).

[simont]

Videos also exacerbate the problems with the tendency to link to a thing without bothering to say what it is. With a textual page it's not too costly to just follow the link and give it a ten-second eyeballing to figure out whether it was something you cared about (although even then I tend to wish the linker had given a one-sentence summary). But with a video, it can easily take several minutes just to find out what it's about, because of loading time, title sequences and waffly introductions.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

This is somewhat exacerbated by the prevalence of Youtube, with its opaque URLs; something more like the approach adopted by some newspapers, with a title built into the URL, would help. (And in its defence Youtube does have a title on the page containing the video - but there's nothing to guarantee it's useful or accurate and it's not got the same kind of visual prominence as e.g. headlines on news.bbc pages, to pick another user of fairly opaque URLs.)

[dave holland (from livejournal.com)]

agree++

The pacing is the killer for me.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

There's certainly some good stuff out there

Agreed.

spending the occasional hour poking around Youtube can be amusing

Agreed.

there are things that just don't make sense in any other medium

Agreed.

an awful lot of content seems to have migrated into video where previously the same material would have been online in text form

Agreed. I agree with gerald_duck's illustration of other problems, too.

the spread of online video is one of the worst things to happen to the web for some time

Firmly disagree. The benefit from things that work best as video being available as video IMV considerably exceeds the (I agree with you, very considerable) disutility of things being presented as video which shouldn't be. My view is that it is far easier to translate things that are in video but shouldn't be into the desired form than it is to translate things that aren't in video but should be.

Like you, I would like to see the many things which would work better as not-video actually being made available as not-video, but when I add up the benefits and disutilities, my version of the sum comes up well in favour of online video.

[covertmusic.livejournal.com]

It's a matter of context, I reckon.

I'm not going to talk about my own talks, because I'm the worst possible judge of those, but a good talk - say the four at http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/series/interesting2008 - is something which'd be impossible to capture in a transcript or a slide-deck. A bad talk, sure.

Actually, in my mind, transcripts are often the death of talks: a Powerpoint designed as a handout is a horse designed by committee. A really good talk has some theatre to it, and it's a performance, and the writing often has to be very different. I'd structure a talk and a paper covering the same set of ideas very differently, I'd use a different register, and the range of metaphors I'd use would vary.

So I guess I'm in favour of online video, and against lazy public speaking - though whether I live up to that myself, who knows?

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

People are overusing video atm because it's new*. In a couple of years most will settle down and only use video where it is the best tool for the job.

* OK, not really new, but the easy-to-use embedded flash is still new to the mainstream

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I hope you're right l-)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

A couple of years ago I said I hoped you were right, do you think that you were? Certainly I find I’m less annoyed by the question but I’m not sure whether that’s habituation or a reduction in needless use of video.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I agree completely.

I'll always read a transcript instead if one's available, and if not I probably won't watch the video at all, to the annoyance of people who don't share this viewpoint and send me interesting links in video form (hello robhu)

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

I agree with this post.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Ditto podcasts, which a lot of interesting people are doing. So... slow...

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Those seem to have entirely passed me by; I'm not sure I've listened to a single one ever. But yes, I imagine I'd suffer the same annoyances if they impinged upon me more.

[armb.livejournal.com]

I don't listen to many, but the ones I do are easy to stick on an MP3 player and listen to at some convenient time when I don't necessarily have a computer or net connection. Embedded flash video, not so much.

And, while "they have sound" is sometimes a disadvantage, "they don't require vision" is sometimes an advantage (one shared with many videos which add no useful content to their soundtrack unless you can lipread....)

[alextfish.livejournal.com]

Not that you need any more encouragement, but yes, I agree with this too. It's easy to skim a page looking for the interesting bit; it's practically impossible with a video. There are some good uses of video out there, certainly, but it's rather overused at the moment. I hope that the optimists predicting its use will die down are right. (Or, alternatively, that automatic speech-to-text conversion becomes a lot better before too long.)

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

Agree completely. When it comes to presentation of information and arguments, videos are pretty poor compared to text plus illustrations. And the faster you can read, the worse videos are by comparison.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, maybe we're just not doing it right. We should be storing up podcasts on our MP3 players and listening to them while we do the gardening or whatever.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I generally find video annoying. (Unless the video is why the page is there, obviously.) I'd assumed I was just irritable :)

I wonder if video can actually be easier to produce for some applications, even if it's mainly just words. Or if it looks as if it has much more content for small effort, even if most of that extra is just whizzyness rather than actually useful.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

It's easy to produce as a side-effect of some other activity (easier, for instance, than writing the same information some speaker was conveying down in a designed-to-be-read way).