Video Everywhere Potential and Problems
The Forrest Four-Cast: September 27, 2016
In the near future, almost every gadget and almost every device will be equipped with a video-enabled screen. Today we can watch streaming content on smartphones and tablets. Tomorrow it will be available on e-readers, watches and in many of our (soon-to-be-autonomous) vehicles. Other wearable technology and a lot of our next-gen clothing will include this kind of functionality.
Why stop there? It won’t be too long before almost every surface will have video capabilities. Walls in your house or your office will double as giant screens. Bigger still will be the screens that take over the sides of large buildings (which has already happened in many large Asian cities). Small television-type monitors in elevators will eventually be replaced by floor to ceiling screens. In fact, large amounts of space not taken over by some kind of video functionality will become an increasing rare occurrence — these unused spaces will serve as a quaint reminder of bygone days.
But this video-focused future is not quite here yet, not by a long way. One more reminder of the ground yet to cover were the recent revelations that Facebook’s in-house measuring system vastly overestimated advertising metrics as related to online video. According to a Wall Street Journal report from September 22, “Several weeks ago, Facebook disclosed in a post on its ‘Advertiser Help Center’ that its metric for the average time users spent watching videos was artificially inflated because it was only factoring in video views of more than three seconds. The company said it was introducing a new metric to fix the problem.”
Last week’s Facebook report will spur a new wave of startups dedicated to providing new tools for tallying these totals. As is typical with startups, most of these new companies will fail — but a few will succeed and likely solve the metric problem. Consumer preferences, however, are the bigger challenge. Yes, we likes to watch — but current demand doesn’t yet match future possibilities. Until this demand increases, enjoy the relative peace from tomorrow’s video overstimulation.
