My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

The usefulness of online video

tech
by Antonio on

For me, the power of YouTube has always been about one thing: being able to bookmark pieces of interesting mainstream content that could then be forwarded around in email. For every genius amateur video I've been sent, I've had 5 young Asian guitar virtuosos and 100 SNL skits, Simpsons scenes, or Daily Show interviews. Giving chunks for television permalinks seemed novel enough— the next step in the evolution of Tivo even— even if it wasn't the best thing since the web itself.

In fact I've always been rather sanguine on the prospects of embedded video on web pages (mostly because of the linear consumption challenges that come with any form of rich media). Recently though, I've seen two great uses for embedded video that have brought me back to the conclusion I came to after seeing the New York Times's annotated Obama speech: that video online is more about interface and context than it has ever been on any other screen.

The first, TimeTube, is a brilliant reworking of the standard online interface for consuming video that YouTube pioneered and everyone else copied. Recently I heard an entrepreneur defending all of the cloners of this interface because of the fact that "people are used to it now and find it familiar." However, it only takes 5 minutes of playing around with TimeTube to realize what bad interface designers the YouTube guys were, and how much more is possible when mixing links and videos.

disassembledI ran into the second example while performing surgery on my Macbook this weekend. It has now become a yearly event for me to switch out my laptop's hard drive (usually triggered by yet another amazing doubling in HD capacity at a given pricepoint), though I usually loathe the experience of coming to the end of a two hour wrestle with 5 extra screws and no idea of where I should have put them (I've done this now across 3 different laptop models with +/- 3 screws no matter how hard I try).

This year I decided to follow one of the videos that the nice folks from OWC put up for changing various Mac parts and the result was a neat case of the linearity of consumption of video actually helping by guiding me in realtime as I dissected and then reassembled the MacBook. I had to pause and rewind a little in a couple of places, but the overall process was much smoother than its ever been before, thanks to the power of being able to do it alongside my virtual repairman (in fact at one point he got a little stuck, I got a little ahead and somehow managed to miss disconnecting some important cable leading to the laptop's flux capacitor).

I used to think that the bright future of all online video would come when computers could extract meaning from video files and present us with indexes that let us randomly seek to the relevant points, but this week I was again struck by how much usefulness we can still get out of proper contextualization and solid interface design. Go look at TimeTube and think about how this kind of an interface for video navigation could be used to teach more important things than hard drive replacement if you have any doubts.