A blog post by Amit Kumar Mishra on Internet Marketing Trends for 2009 got me thinking again about why the uptake of interactive video seems to be generally slower on the Internet than other disruptive technologies that have come along in the past.
As Amit suggests, the interactive video space is definitely one to watch this year, as it is becoming more mainstream. I personally feel that this will run over into 2010, with massive take up thereafter. I have been working in this space for 4 years now and in the last 6 months we have witnessed a large mainstream uptake in this arena, with global brands starting to leverage the benefits that interactive video can deliver. This is not just from the point of view of driving traffic directly from a video to an e-commerce or destination portal, but also information about how the user interacts with the elements within the video. MTV’s recent venture into the space with the Cold War Kids video and our customers’ ventures are evidence of this. Unfortunately, this arena may have not seen the instant mainstream adoption that other similar, recent disruptive technologies have experienced. I personally believe that this is due to the fact, that unlike other, “new” disruptive areas such as social networking, we as users, did not have an established behaviour. We created a new behaviour to take on the benefits of this new technology.
Our normal video viewing behaviour, which has been established over a lifetime, is somewhat different. Interactive video changes video from being a fairly unidimensional entity into a multi-dimensional one. This is very disruptive to our normal behaviour patterns, requiring the viewer to depart from the passive viewing experience and become “part” of the content, make choices.
Interactive video is definitely poised to disrupt our normal viewing behaviour, effectively turning video into a web element like any other, complete with links, cross references, quoting and a web of information behind the elements within the content.
The only question is, how long is it going to take for that momentum to grow? How long until interactive video is the defacto standard of internet video? Due to this being a fundamental change to how we do, one of the things the modern society does a lot of, watch video, it may take a little while longer than social networking’s pervasive penetration. However, it is not a question of if, only when. The benefits of having metadata and links in video itself are to significant not to be taken up. It is not that hard to imagine watching a piece of content in the future and thinking, “What have I seen him in before?”, clicking on the actor and being given links and/or data surrounding that “object”, his IMDB profile for instance, a list of films he has been in, etc, etc.
When the floodgates open, video will never be the same again…. It is only a matter of time.
28 May 2009 - Gary Wilson
