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| Laser Cats and Steven Speilberg, who would have thought? |
We've recognized the impact of Youtube.com on popular culture, but has Youtube affected Innovation? Perhaps more than it is being credit for. Think back a moment to the year 1999 - your modem was slow, the internet was slower and any attempts at streaming media were complicated enterprise scenarios. HTML 4, which had just been released in 1998, did not do a great job of dealing with any sort of media or plugins so one had to use technologies such as RealMedia or Flash which made using video quite the chore. Fast forward to 2012 - while there are a variety of easy to use video streaming technologies available - Youtube.com has staked out massive chunk of the market. Anyone can embed youtube videos in any type of online or mobile media w/ almost zero concern about how it's going to work or if its going to work. Many folks will still complain about buffering but that's not so bad considering what we've been given.
And what did we get? Back in the 1990's, video and even film production was prohibitively expensive and complex. Now if one is equipped with a DSLR HD camera and editing software they can easily produce media that would have cost many thousands of dollars or more just a few years ago. That's no guarantee of quality of course, but then quality was never guaranteed before either. We're still at the beginning of this converged media revolution so we'll be viewing a lot of cable access level productions, yet think about what this means.
First, when combined with the reality of Netflix, it has finally brought us to what was referred to for decades as Video on Demand - referred to but never realized of course (one of the first attempts to do that goes back all the way to cable providers in Columbus, Ohio in 1975). This is changing the business model for television - just as web-based news has changed the business model for print media. Second, it is beginning to open the floodgates for rich learning content - check out Khan Academy has an example of how this evolving.
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| More than Laser Cats? |
Lastly, the same type of technology used to enable YouTube streaming media is being applied to real-time collaboration venues. When real-time meetings conclude - where do they get archived? YouTube is the number one destination. This is fundamentally changing the way we manage problem-solving in groups or communities and will eventually change the nature and pace of scientific discovery and collaboration.
Copyright 2012, Semantech Inc. All rights Reserved
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