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

[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.