It’s now officially Josh Kinberg month here on Momentshowing.
JD Lasica interviewed Josh recently about his ideas on web video.
watch here
There seems to be different camps forming around online video.
Some people like the Flash video that you can easily watch on the page.
But you must also skip around page to page to watch it.
The other school of thought is pushing the meme of delivering video in RSS feeds…allowing tools to help manage this media locally and sync it to devices.
But some people hate having download the video to watch it.
In a year, as more people are educated, we will hit a sweet spot where people realize that each is good for different purposes. Flash video is good for adding stuff to MySpace-like profiles or web pages so people can pop in and watch. Video in RSS is good when you really want to distribute far and wide. Whe you can watch web video on TV, you’l need to download the large files locally. Think an open-TIVO system.
It’s my sneaking belief that as more and more people start watching video online…even the biggest servers will have problems keeping up. Soon, even the silliest goof will have a thousand viewers because hundreds of millions of people are online. The most popular content will have TV network audiences of millions.
How do we handle this?
Big media companies will have little problem throwing money at the problem.
But how do make sure the individual person, the independent creator, can stay in the game?
Distribute the load.
Bit torrent is a proven method for trading files between many computers.
People must become accustomed to downloading media when they aren’t using their computers…and "seeding" it for other people. Communities will form around video they like and support…since not all creators can afford the absurd bandwidth bills of hosting media themselves for huge audiences that they deserve.
But aren’t torrents complicated?
If you use aggregators to subscribe to torrent feeds, it’s all invisible.
Just subscribe, download, play.
Since we now have "always on" broadband connections…it’s all good.
But torrent technology has a huge PR problem…the stigma of piracy.
It’s all perception though.
Nothing in the technology says you have to trade copyrighted material. Hollywood has just created the situation where "stealing" is the option if you want to watch something.
(Think "war on drugs". Don’t provide logical alternatives and criminalize the user.)
Digital Bicycle is a site that lets Community TV producers trade entire programs through torrents.
You make a show, upload a torrent, and then anyone can download it and air it on their local Public Access station. It’s all in the use case.
Anyway…lots of educating needs to happen. Different scenarios must play themselves out this year. Tools need to be created and evolved. Realities will push us to change. Fun stuff.
Video online is happening fast.
I agree here. Bandwidth is a problem when you create something so good it gets spammed across the net and then you’re scrambling to keep your site up. One example of this is http://www.wongfuproductions.com/indexhome.shtml They recently put out a video called “Yellow Fever” It’s hilarious and I’d advise people to check it out. These guys have had to resort to putting the video on YouTube and getting a torrent going so that they can keep up. The great thing about torrents is the more demand there is for a video the quicker you will download that video as there are more people to share the data. Another website which makes great use torrents is http://www.purepwnage.com when a episode comes out they put up a torrent to distribute their video. Good thing is that their community is made up of a lot of computer savvy people “gamers” who can take advantage of this technology. Aggregators are definitely going to have to be able to do this in the background for people who don’t care how they get the video it just “magically” gets to their hard drive.
Hello Jay, excellent synobis of the torrent world and where its going. The UK BBC as just started to go the torrent direction for some of there old “situation comedy” catolog. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/12/21/BBC_goes_torrent/
As you pointed out the RSS frees are purfect for the user to keep up todate with whats out there. At the moment RSS is new to a lot of net users, so there a learnering curve there.
One of the big stumbling block is for peaple is to leave their PC on when they are not using it for day to day use. If left on they can get the benifits of their 24/7 net connection. To reseed the torrents they support or download the torrents they want.
A second stumbling block to torrents is the setting up the torrent client and its needs, ie, open ports on the firewall and if they behind a natted rounter to port forward the needed ports to a machine that got a static ip.As you pointed out peaple will become more Digical savy, In time setting up a PC to torrent will be just become another software setup for the home user.
Or they could get some one to setup a torrentflux box for them. Check out http://www.torrentflux.com/ I could see that a torrentflux box would be the video box of the near future. Your own home torrent server a torrentflux box. The completed downloads on the flux box could be on a shared foulder on a home network. PCs on that network would click and play. Torrentflux as a perpose built web interface for your torrents management and built in Aggregator for the RSS frees.
Regards : Peter Colton