Experimenting with video services

Now, we all know that broadcast TV is dead or dying, right? No? Well for the sake of argument, let’s assume it is – for me personally, it’s been dead for years as I haven’t owned a TV in quite a while. Contrary to what one might think, that fact doesn’t prevent watching movies or TV series – quite the contrary. It delivers me from having to face the world of force-fed, crappy, unpersonalized and generally useless advertisements that tend to dominate the airways these days.

Amazingly, people often get this puzzled expression when they hear I don’t own a TV – a question that usually follows is “So what do you do then?” Invariably I’m like “ehh, excuse me?” as I just don’t get the question. As if there is nothing else in the world to do than watch TV. Instead, what I find amazing is where these people find the time to watch television as much as they do, almost 3 hours a day on average in Finland.

Anyway, the future of TV is on-demand or time-shifted; the line between the two is one drawn in water. What comes to consumption, the number one problem with video on demand is the vast amount of content – there is too much to choose from. People are inherently lazy and they rarely really know what they want – usually it’s just something that is just “good enough” to keep one entertained for a while – so the act of selection becomes too difficult from the vast ocean of media. Cutting down the selection is one area where broadcast excels, as you have to choose from one of the ongoing programs. We all know youtube.com and BitTorrent and other P2P services and what you can do with those. The best content I usually see on YouTube comes via friends’ recommendations. The salvation of VoD would be personalized recommendations done right.

You may wonder what this has to do with anything. The thing is that I recently discovered the Brightcove catalog. I’m planning on sifting through that to find the personally interesting content around and then place it on a dedicated page for others to enjoy also; hopefully that and similar services allow me to create some kind of a personal, automatically updated online video vault. Of course, the video quality (i.e. image quality) on the Internet still leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s constantly improving. Like my personal vault, it’ll hopefully get there eventually.

Meanwhile, enjoy the Sony BMG Top music videos thing below: