It’s really great that video is becoming more prevalent on the web. We can now ditch our TVs and watch video online. We can watch presentations given at conferences that we missed or couldn’t attend.
However, it’s really annoying when all I want is some quick information, but I have to sit or scrub through 5 minutes of irrelevant babble to get to the gold. For instance, when Android came out, Google posted some nice, long videos about their technology. If you wanted to know any detailed information about it, you had to sit through the boring video.
Technocracy Radio discussed fora.tv in their last podcast. Basically, it’s sort of the C-SPAN of the internet, but not just restricted to politics. While having all of this video is great, I think having a textual transcription of the speech is much more valuable. You can easily search text and do all kinds of data mining with it. I think the next breakthrough in media is going to be when speech to text recognition is perfected, fast, and cheap. This way, we can search for any time the President says, “nukular.” We can also have TVs that recognize a viewer’s laughter and flag the funniest quotes in a Simpsons episode. Awesome!