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

[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.)