When you talk to the gurus, they tell you advertising revenue will come from the internet, or cell phones hooked to the internet, etc. That print advertising is dying off.
There is no point in having hi resolution video if you can't use it to make good money. The Internet may be able to support the bandwidth that is required for smallish size video presentations, and that's here already, but as soon as you go bigger and complex, you encounter many problems that make me a little apprehensive. At least for now.
I noticed that many of the luxury goods sites that first embraced the video/flash technology and had the budget for it, have somehow gone back to more conventional stills, maybe with a little Flash thrown in, but keeping the video clips as something you can view as secondary links.
These are some of the possible problems that come to mind:
-Preloading. No-one has the patience for preloading high quality, (and bigger size) video. Not commercially at least. You need instant hi quality play. Streaming is better but the resolution/size/compression suffer, cross fades or movement look patchy, compression is noticeable.
-Quite apart from bandwidth matters, your average computer can't handle video over the Internet or even locally too well. There are too many stalls and jerkiness and video cards can't cope too well. Commercially, a couple of little stalls and you've lost your viewer and possible client, it irritates so much.
People are already reluctant to change computers, they think that what they have is good enough, there is little appetite to upgrade.
-Cost of production. The average still picture is relatively cheap. However, video requires far more knowledge, equipment, post production, etc. things that cost quite a lot of money. For it to succeed and become the norm, it needs to be reasonably affordable to the advertisers and cheap to produce. The camera is probably the least expensive item. I'm thinking of the time it takes to film various scenes or takes, then the blending, special effects in post production and so on.
-Cell phones. Everybody is predicting a massive growth in advertising using these. And apparently in Japan, it's going very well. But I just can't see the thrill of looking at websites with movies on a tiny little screen. It's just not fun, novelty value perhaps, like with the iphone, soon you get bored, unless you are in your teens or completely brainwashed.
Before long, every single camera will be equipped with reasonable quality video, I wonder if people will become immune and start to think that it's all so easy, why pay so much when my liltle nephew can do just as well with his cam.
Anyway, this is just lose thoughts, open to everything, I want good evidence to be convinced that it will all take off.
As for the Red, I like the idea of innovation, modularity, quality and reasonable prices, my first impression though, is that it looks a bit bulky.
Edward
