by Carlos García Moreno-Torres
2010 has finished, and yes, this is a big deal for Online Video; for such a young thing, every turn in the calendar is, and this is a big turn in the calendar. Not only a year, but a whole decade comes to an end, and looking back we can see that each year offered milestones for video on the web: 2000 to 2005 was the prehistory of online video with some small sites mostly offering video downloads that one played locally. In 2005 Skype introduced videocalls and not yet knowing its monumental consequence, YouTube was born. In 2006 YouTube was bought by Google and by 2007 it consumed as much bandwidth as all of the Internet did in 2000. Video had already changed the whole deal of the Internet.
In 2009 the iPhone joined the party and became a major player in online video with the release of the iPhone 3GS, the first model to include a video camera, multiplying uploads to Youtube by 4 in the first week. Now, about 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube – in other words, there are almost 6 new years of video available only on YouTube.
But there’s online video beyond Youtube. A good example is Vimeo, a site that was actually born one year before Google’s video giant. With a different purpose, focusing on user created content, it has grown to become one of the biggest video sites, and the standard online video web platform for audiovisual creators, with a large artist user-base.
Three big online broadcasting companies (Justin.TV, UStream and LiveStream) were founded in 2007, and have continued to grow, making internet broadcasting accessible to anyone and more and more common. Websites focused on entertaining clips like Metacafe or Dailymotion have expanded non- stop following YouTube’s footsteps, and Facebook having integrated video sharing feels like centuries ago. Videochat expanded from Skype to all other major IM services (MSN Messenger, Yahoo, Gmail…), and even more traditional media companies like newspapers include videos in their online editions now, with some social-video news on their way to becoming mainstream (like the dutch zie.nl).
If we look to a different screen, the one found within our living rooms, we can see how PlayStation3, Xbox360, Netflix, Hulu, Boxee, Apple TV and, more recently, GoogleTV have been progressively half taking-over, half partnering with the traditional audiovisual industry networks to bring online video to our televisions.
But it’s not all about the platforms. Online video is maturing as fast as the technology that supports it makes possible. We’ve seen the constant increase in the resolution of video, 3D online video is a reality (as we wrote a few weeks ago), and HTML5 and the new possibilities it will bring are around the corner. With a need to rule and organize on the go, the basis for open video online (referring, by open, to both content and techology) are also in constant evolution: WebM, Wikimedia, open video databases such as the Open Images project (facilitated by the Netherlands-based Institute for Sound and Vision)…we can be sure that the next generation of online video is coming, and it will be here sooner than later.
Nevertheless, and in spite of the great growth that online video has had (and is expected to keep having), not all the stories are about success. 2010 was also the year of Chatroulette, a Russian company that allows users to randomly video-chat with other users and jump to a new random connection at any time in the exchange. It achieved great popularity, created some Internet celebrities and had some real celebrities talking about it and taking part…and after being one of the year’s big hypes…it just vanished. Today you can still visit Chatroulette, but the number of users has dropped drastically, and it’s now an internet old glory, just like Altavista or Lycos.
When looking for something more tangible than all of these proliferating platforms and formats, we find the people behind the videos, with the greatest example being the important role online video played in Obama’s presidential run in 2008 showing, for the first time, the potential and power of this media.
But what will we see in this new decade? Will online video evolve into open video practices? Will it get shaped into a new industry controlled product delivering professional content to our homes and devices? Will people still watch “Charlie bit my finger” in 2020? Or going a little further: will people still gather around a screen after a dinner to watch the latest YouTube hit?
Well, it’s impossible to tell right now, and if good news is we’ll certainly have the answer in only ten years, excellent news is that the process and the daily discovery will be amazing and exciting.
Welcome into a new era.