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.

[naath.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.]

[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.

[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.

[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

[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...

[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.

[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.