Advent of the Online Video

Judson Laipply’s ‘Evolution of Dance’ video has been viewed online over 112 million times – and that’s just on Youtube. ‘Charlie bit my finger’, an innocuous video in which baby Charlie bites his brother’s finger and giggles afterwards, has been viewed 77 million times. And a 5-second clip of a chipmunk with a seemingly startled expression has close to 13 million views.

The list of internet video phenomena is a long and strange one. They all come from the same place: no marketing, no production budget – usually, no planning at all! Beyond the whimsical charm of these videos, and their incredible viewing figures, they speak volumes about what online delivery has done to video in general.

Bandwidth constraints on uploading and downloading mean that a lot of online videos are seen at low quality. Youtube converts all uploaded video files to Flash (.flv) format, which leads to inevitable declines in quality. Yet even with the option to download high quality files, most users wouldn’t have the patience to do this. Quality is not the major concern for the online viewer – it’s all about the idea. A video will rise and fall on the strength of its idea, how funny or bizarre it is and, accordingly, whether it has mass appeal.

Popular video virals also spawn ‘remixes’ and ‘mash ups’ with other topical icons. A little searching reveals an ‘Evolution of Dance’ starring Optimus Prime, of the Transformers franchise, a video entitled ‘Charlie bit Sarah Palin’ and a mash up of the dramatic chipmunk and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. While these videos haven’t been viewed as many times as the originals, they still reach incredible numbers (the Thriller chipmunk currently has 700,000 views). What this shows is that we are no longer passive viewers, but actively recycle and recreate what we see and enjoy. Video is no longer controlled by a small group of people with extensive training and high-tech equipment.

The media and advertising sectors have recognized the potential gains of online video, particularly the viral. If successful, a video viral will cost very little to make yet have wide exposure. There isn’t even a need to market the video. If they’re working well, virals – true to their name – will spread throughout the Internet all by themselves.

However, before businesses jump on the bandwagon they should consider two important points. First, virals and the potential responses to them are not especially open to being commercialised. Many have a subversive tone, inappropriate for broadcasting corporate messages. Indeed, reactions to an ‘Evolution of Dance’ sponsored by Pepsi would probably be negative. Furthermore, if a corporate-sponsored viral is unleashed, the creators should have every expectation that it will be warped by viewers – perhaps even turned against them.

Second, it is very difficult to predict which ideas will take off. The successful virals have the fascinating effect of snowballing – eventually their attraction becomes the fact they’ve been viewed so many times. It’s an online version of our natural instinct to be drawn to the crowd surrounding a street performer – we reason that if something is of that much interest, it must be important to us too. In theory, any video could begin to snowball – there is no sure-fire hit.

Considering Youtube has only been around since 2005, it is hard to imagine what video and its delivery will look like in five, ten… twenty years’ time. I can’t wait to see the ‘Evolution of Video’ viral on the Youtube of the future.

Tom