TTMGi Blog

YouTube is gearing up to be the future of Television, it seems, with a paid-for offering not too far away. According to YouTube, the vast majority of people will be watching telly over the internet before long. Within a few years, they also claim, 90 percent of all internet traffic will be video.

That is of course data traffic, it does not necessarily mean eyeballs – if you pull up a page and sit reading it, the traffic has already happened. The traffic occurs when you download the page.

Not true of video, of course: as you watch, each minute consumed is a minute of internet traffic. It may be that the 90% of traffic envisaged is all telly and humorous clips of dogs and nutters, but I think the implication is also there that video will be more prevalent on sites in general.

To what end a video on a website then? Well a bit of movement and a short clip often enhances content, but my concern would be when video replaces text entirely. It is certainly jolly tempting in some cases as it seems to, on the face of it, cut down the time it takes to get the content across. Except that is not always the case.

A classic example of video misuse is in user training where it currently has perhaps a stronger hold than in general sales on the web. The misaprehension is that showing the user a video saves time and confusion and just gets to the money so much more quickly and efficiently. This, in many instances, is not the case.

If, for example, you just need a small amount of information to make sense of a function, sitting through a 10 minute routine is frustrating and time taking. If you don’t watch the full presentation, it can take you 10 minutes anyway fast forwarding and reversing through the thing to find the bit you want.  Not only that, there is nothing to take away. At least with a written instruction you can print off a page and write on it. If it is text you can search through it; if it is just a bunch of videos, the titling has to be spot on. Or alternatively the meta data has to fully comprehensive and searchable – and it rarely is.

If we take this idea forward and say that a greater percentage of website ‘content’, not just traffic, will be video then we may be entering a very frustrating world that may perversly undermine the very foundations of the search empire that Google (the owner of YouTube) is built upon.

Oddly enough something similar has happened before. The internet is not really that old, but back in the late ’90s, when Flash started to take hold, there was a very strong philosophy abroad that basically said “because we can we should”. As a consequence a lot of money was spent on resource hungry websites that basically just ground to a halt on the dial up connections commonly used at the time. A great deal of back tracking occured shortly afterwards with Flash rich sites being rebuilt as primarily static sites with a Flash component, or even none.

With streaming technology now well advanced and broadband availability almost (but not quite) universally available, the future will not be quite the same, but we may well find that after a while thoughtlessly switching to a predominantly video version of the internet starts to work against all of us and we will then have to think again.

Alternatively, why not think it though first, consult wisely and use video on your site to the best advantage possible right at the outset.

If you would like more information, get in touch with TTMG internet.