Video Podcasting, the video ipod & front row

First off: disclaimer, i speak for myself and not my employer. And i’d have written less if i had more time….

Since the dawn of podcasting people have been looking beyond audio to video. I’ve mostly dismissed this as dreaming, and then pointed out the exceedingly high production costs to video. I’ve worked on producing videos and it’s a lot of work to get something which looks at all good. For that matter audio is a lot harder to produce than text. We are all trained in school how to write, and a little how to talk, but fewer people learn how to act. Creating quality productions is hard. That means as you go from low emerson to high emerson mediums you get less and less ability to emerse the reader/listener/viewer in the work. The effort required for the consumer is inversely proportional to that to create the medium.

For a while that’s why hollywood is going to stick around. People like easy to consume media which have high production values. Hollywood is not great because of it’s acting, nor scripts, but the production values which it can afford to apply to what it produces.

So from an anarchist perspective, videocasting isn’t the best place to start. For participatory media there are places like making it easy to publish text, photos, and the like is better.

With improving software and video production technology slowly the quality of video you can produce with a very small group of people using consumer tools is improving. Movies like fourth world war produced by the big noise films collective show that with talent and a lot of hard work high production values can be achieved by broke activists.

So, some people can produce good quality video. Not as many as text with blogging, nor audio with podcasting, but there is enough out there to make the space interesting.

The second issue, which to me is bigger, is watching it. Clearly this is a problem which will be solved. At first there were a few channels, and you had to get up and walk over to the tv to change them. Then there was cable, remotes, vcr’s and the like. All of which are taking the TV watching user experience and making it more flexible. Then there was interactive tv which thankfully died on the vine. It died for two reasons, first because the industries behind TV believe in a walled garden. Secondly it died because the interface sucked.

With the collapse of interactive TV driven from the media companies out, there was the rise of TIVO and related PVR’s (Personal Video Recorders). These tools let the viewers escape ads and the purely linear chronological nature of TV with the ability to easily record shows and skip commercials.

In parallel to the rise of PVR’s there was a disruptive force which liberated consumers of music to listen to what they want, the p2p networks and their napsterization of the music industry. What was closed became open. Because the music industry fought it rather than embracing and extending. Music activists have done great work, but mostly they’ve been following the mass actions of people who just like music.

Once people started saving TV show’s on their hard drives they wanted to share them. This is especially driven by a TV industry which delays the showing programs by years in different markets. The fans in the UK or Finland want to see the US shows at more or less the same time as viewers in the US, not years later. So people are grabbing the show’s and putting them up online using the p2p networks built for music to transfer ripped TV shows and movies. Now these are shows which in most cases you couldn’t buy anywhere, but only watch with ads in a few places where they’d actually been broadcast.

For me the advent of p2p networks for TV shows, and in general trading video files has revived some of my interest in TV programs. Over the last month i watched the first season of Lost, a series i never would have watched on TV because i don’t have one. Lots of people have started getting their TV online, just focusing on the shows they want to watch, and cutting out the %25 of the time eaten up in commercials.

But the process is super clunky. Sure you get shows, good enough quality, and while it’s not easy to get the shows, it’s doable. The trick is, the viewing experience still sucks. You’re loading things up in a computer, it’s screen size and interface is not what you want for entertainment. Until you solve the, how do i watch it, is this the right social mode, it’s useless to have the video. MPlayer makes viewing easy enough, it works for geeks. But really apple’s avoided making a video ipod because the user experience sucks. There are other portable video players, the ones which have taken off make it easy to get videos on them. Those being the ones which play DVD’s. They’ve been put in cars, people take them to calm the kids on flights, or entertain truckers on the road. The ones which don’t have dvd players haven’t taken off because there isn’t an easy way to GET the video content you want to watch, where you want to watch it.

Now apple has said it is going to start a video ipod. That’s not really so interesting as an end in and off itself, but because it’s paired with front row which turns the computer in to an easy to use, remote controlled media center. The computer can transition from being a work device to an entertainment device then it makes sense. I suspect we’ll be seeing a version of the airport express which does video streaming with tv hookups so you can watch media in your living room. If you transfer things to your ipod, you can plug it in to your tv as well, but that’s not as slick. Already people are discovering that if you just watch some shows and don’t get the evening news or sports then it’s cheaper to watch via itunes/ivideo than cable and by paying per show you escape ads.

So the question is, how open will itunes be? Are they going to create a walled garden. I tried opening some ripped dvd’s which mplayer and vlc are happy to play, but itunes didn’t recognize them. Will the openness and drm freeness which made podcasting work remain with VOD and videocasting? There were podcasting companies such as audiofeast which tried to build a DRM walled garden, they failed. The real power of video and the home entertainment center is when it is open enough for people to get the content they want, to feel in control. The reason itunes works is that it’s just enough freedom that you don’t hate their walled garden. The walls are still there, but the user just doesn’t run in to them as much. A big part of the reason Yahoo Music Engine and Rhapsody aren’t as popular, beyond brand and marketing, is that they don’t let the user feel free.

Remember that feeling free, or being ‘free enough’ is exactly the problem which happened with MoveableType and caused me to stop using it a couple of years ago. Thankfully Six Apart left easy ways for me to transition to other platforms. With home media systems i’m not sure that will be the case.