Two Video Sites and a Signpost

Posted on August 14, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content, European Web 2.0 |

Videojug and viewdo are interesting steps on the way to the new media dawn.

Videojug is run out of the UK by a band of television professionals. Viewdo was founded by a couple of American guys seeking out a cool business to grow. Videojug goes on location to film instructional videos, Viewdo puts more onus on the user to supply video of their special skill or knowledge base.

These two distinctions apart what do they say about where the medium is headed or what the “medium” is becoming?

Both sites are purposeful - where the upload giants are precisely that, giant meeting places where a user’s need for novelty is bound to be met somehow in the clip mania world.

Videojug and viewdo are inherently profiling their users - you don’t watch a video on how to hang a door without having a door to hang so with the right contextual advertising and clever sponsorship sales they have an obvious business model.

They also fit into what I think will be the future practical web, helping people with everyday life. That already now includes howstuffworks, parent blogging, diet blogging, diet aids such thedailyplate, aspiration.

I’m amazed at the level at which people seek help. So on videojug it might be as trivial as how to eat sushi or as important as how to become breast aware (for women at risk of breast cancer).

What’s also noticeable on both sites is they down-grade celebrity - these are practical videos that cover territory that TV has already covered. Neither site uses celebrity presenters though - how well that goes down with the public is a wait-and-see. In fact that can be said of most new content sites outside of the clip mania world.

So what do they say about what is emerging?

Taken as a group, the many sites now offering practical help suggest that Web 2.0 content will be orientated towards helping people over-come deficincies. Sounds a terrible way to put it. What I mean though is that we have a couple of generations now where educatioin has failed us - in terms of parenting, eating, living. And it is a big subject area for Web 2.0 content start-ups.

We know also that Web 2.0 content is not only about linear video. Daily Plate is building a community around knowledge about the calorie values of food but essentially what it does is gets us to create content which we alone consume. So we begin to digitise intimate parts of our lives for later consumption. Though we knew Web 2.0 content would be on-demand, the big change is in our relationship to information, it becoming part group, part global but also part intimate.

That says to me that Web 2.0 content will help us in the way Outlook has helped over the past decade. Web 2.0 content will in effect become part of the great aide memoire that good communications technologies provide - what’s a better storage medium than a book or even an story? By enriching our capacity to make use of memory, it adds to our overall experience. This is also the emotional web.

The web as an inifinite knowledge base is also growing. Wikipedia might in the end be the least important of these recources, being akin to a grand dictionary whereas mini-knowledge sites like videojug and viewdo, daily plate etc, have practical implications.

And we can see how entrepreneurs content with a small business future can align themselves with these sites to develop small income base or to exploit their content again and again, syndicating through, for example ViewDo, Netscape, bliptv, revver, and others.

Finally though what about the public and its readiness for more video? Accenture just did a study (more of which later) which showed that the majority of the public are not really aware of the IPTV services about to come on stream.

So while they are jumping around the clip and upload services, they’ve yet to understand that the revolution is about to spread to their TV sets. What Accenture also found out however is that along with access to more movies, a substantial proportion of people want access to more specialist programming. It doesn’t come much more specialist than what viewdo and videojug are up to.

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