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.