In every sense of the word, I am a complete and bonafide nerd. How do I know this? Well I happen to be one of those crazy people that will drool over computer graphics and actually read about benchmarks. I will see a video and care if it's an HD or not. And because of all these different things, when I visit YouTube a nagging question arises in the back of my head - Why are all these videos looking like they came straight out of the pages of Real Media nightmare from the AOL era?
Up till now these questions were only answered by movie studios which liked to spend the money on the bandwidth to put their movie trailers on the internet. Even the technology has been out there for a while, Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, and of course Real Player but if you ever wanted good high quality videos you would either have to dish out the money for it or download the media using illegitimate means (Bittorrent, Gnuttella network).
Recently however, Divx, the company that developed Divx has put out a browser plugin that allows you to stream Divx and play them directly in your browser over a run of the mill HTTP connection (and it's available for Firefox and Internet Explorer). It's not only (extremely) light weight but it also lets you automatically save played videos to a folder for playback later in any player, including the Divx player for a normal desktop machine.
Whether or not it is financially viable for a company to keep this up is another matter entirely though. YouTube according to industry analysts is still not making any money for Google despite the two billion cost and yet the phenomenon of other video services popping up around it is hard to dismiss. In the old days of the internet if someone sent you a link to a video and it was something popular, the hosting server would probably get hammered into a denial-of-service but these days there's so many sources to get your fix from it's hard to kill many of these video companies. So maybe this is indeed a blessing in disguise. Many video services can thrive but one will surely die and again this is only for now....
The future of the internet is one of endless bandwidth and that day is sooner then you think. Ten years ago sending an image was a big deal; five years ago it was music; and today we are sharing video. There's no other type of media that takes more bandwidth then video and ten years from now? Let's just say that streaming Bluray / HD-DVD quality video will be as simple and easy as sending one picture.
In the end the winners will be those that bring quality, ease-of-use, and performance to the masses as quickly as possible because the nerds are the ones that notice and despite what people might think, it is the nerds that control what gets popular on the internet. This is why MySpace is nothing but a fad just like AOL once was; and will inevitably fail for the same reason. It won't happen overnight but people's internet surfing habits are hard to influence in the first place. This future that I'm talking about is one of endless media. More media will be created and watched daily then any one person can even comprehend in a thousand life times; and as the internet expands beyond the walls of the developed nations of the world that too will cause the media flow to explode many times more fold. Finally after all this bandwidth comes into play and becomes available we will again find ourselves in a world where anyone can download anything faster than they can watch it which will create the biggest, but unstoppable train of illegal media which the MPAA and RIAA will be powerless to stop. Well, at least you can expect movie tickets and concert tickets to go up. Those are the only ways the music / movie industries would be able to make money.
So what will probably happen? I don't know. No one knows. That's what's so fun about tracking the internet. You think you know what's coming but then Digg, or Google, or Slashdot, or 4chan comes running in and surprising you with the next fad.
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Edit: I just noticed that it was shut down lol. I am still in there with Veoh I think they will go far at least with less spammy videos. YouTube is for annoying random videos that I do not want to watch.
Salvere vale mei amor.
It is an interesting thought of where the Internet will take us in the future, whether it be next year, 5 years, 10 years and beyond.
With it being 6:28am my local time, and not having slept, I won't try to contemplate right now *yawns*, hehe.
I went to the Stage6 website not too long ago, first thing I saw was "Stage6 Shut Down" so I thought bugger it and closed the tab. Went there just before and noticed 'Stage6 is introducing Veoh Networks Inc.' on the right side of the site.. Seems this 'Veoh' has integrated Stage6 users, or so I assume. *shrugs*
Nate - Artician: Beta Tester - Designer: uGeeka Studios