The other day, I was talking to someone who puts together videos for a local city and community. These videos are done under a public broadcasting program which was mandated by the FCC for the local cable companies. I noted that their inventory had something like 100 video interviews of local nonprofit groups, politicians, and local businesses. There were so many videos that you couldn't watch them all, but they were all of interest and things that anyone living in the city should probably know.
Indeed, I'm sure we've all had this problem when trying to do research on a topic, and finding hundreds of videos on any given subject. It is amazing, truly amazing the number of videos that are available today. There was an interesting article in Silicon Valley Business Journal posted an interesting article on May 20, 2013 titled; "YouTube: It would take 16 years to watch a single day's worth of video uploads," by Luke Strangel
Yes, but relevancy is the key. The deluge is problematic as more important videos don't get watched, yet bizarre one-off novelty often does and goes viral for no real reason giving nothing of value to the human race. Have you ever heard that quote; "water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink," apparently written by a seaman on a long voyage. Well, I sometimes feel like that when I consider the number of videos out there. The quality is less than to be desired, and people are used to getting high definition videos when they watch their large screen TVs.
All of a sudden, they're viewing a cheesy video which looks quite grainy from their mobile tech device or smartphone, perhaps a tablet computer or an iPad. It's not the same, and yet those TV programs now can also send high definition, and the video is crisp. Soon people will be putting up high definition videos of their cats, pets, children, their kid's soccer games. That's all well and good, but how much of this content do we really need? Let me ask you something?
When you were a kid and you played soccer, was all that so meaningful that you wished you had a video of every single game you played? Or did you just want the major championship games, and only the highlights? Right, so why are we putting all of this online when we don't really care and are not going to ever watch again? I've gone onto various YouTube channels that people put up, and many of them have under 100 views.
In other words no one is watching these videos that everyone is putting up, but we have terabytes of information in video now; to what avail? It's a relevant question, something we need to talk about. Therefore I ask that you think on it.
