What About Video?
When Google bought YouTube a few months ago, there were suddenly 1.65 billion new reasons to take online video sharing seriously as a business and a consumer passion (if you didn’t already take it seriously, that is). Though it’s not clear yet how that business will really work (how will content owners get paid? What about amateur video contributors?), it seems fairly clear that user-generated content and online media sharing are here to stay in one form or another.
Sharing video is quickly becoming as routine a thing for many users (especially those under 35) as emailing photos or swapping songs.
And given that, it seems likely that there’s a future for viral video on wireless digital picture frames.
After all, the ability to send the hilarious video you just found online to your friend’s wall is pretty tempting, yes? It’s easy to see this becoming a huge pastime among high school and college students and those just out of college – and since digital picture frames have high-quality screens, abundant network connections, and (many have) speakers, the experience should be great.
From the business side, it will be great, too, since it will increase viewership and thus ad revenues.
Before we get there, though, there are a few things we ought to consider to make sure that this future is satisfying.
First, manufacturers should consider building a feature into their software that identifies the sender of a picture or video to a frame. Without that, we won’t know who to thank or to curse for that video that showed up last night during dinner. Otherwise, the potential for a constant stream of unexpected, context-free, and just plain odd video seems overwhelming.
Secondly, manufacturers will need to concern themselves with some kind of content filtering. After all, if we can share video with any of our friends, there’s nothing to stop porn, violent content, or other potentially objectionable content from showing up, unbidden, at the wrong time. Perhaps looking at how videos are tagged and then allowing users to create a blocked tags list would solve this?
Third, the availability of video is likely to mean the emergence of TV-style advertising. I’ll touch on this in more detail next week, but it will be interesting to see how consumers respond if wireless photo frames starting running 30-second spots.
Lastly, since videos take up so much more disk space than photos, memory is going to be an issue. The continued expansions of memory capacity coupled with its declining price should render this moot, but an eye ought to at least be kept on it.
However it comes to fruition, I look forward to being able to send videos – sweet, cheeky, silly, whatever – to the walls and desks of friends and family across the country.
Digital Picture Frames, What About, Wireless Home, Wireless Picture Frames
Digital Picture Frames, Wireless Photo Frame, wireless-picture-frames, wireless-video
