Rise of "The Video"

A picture is worth a thousand words. According to this interesting blog post, a video is worth a thousand googles - a very precise way to demonstrate the rise of videos as an information transfer medium.

Videos have turned out to be effective in disbursing information because of lots of reasons:

1. Compared to a written description, a video clip can convey much more information in a much shorter period of time.
2. Internet is full of people who are lazy and don't like to read (like me). Even those who love to read don't mind watching videos. The size of audience, therefore, is just amazingly big.
3. The amount of talent or skill needed to convey something in video is much lower than it is in written description.
   

Any kind of communication involves 3 parties: the sender, the receiver and the medium. Videos make the medium more impactful while lowering the threshold it needs to be a good sender and/or receiver.

The next question to ask is : are there particular kinds of communication that are more suited to video than others ? I think our last class on blogs brought up at least one such kind. Any kind of communication that comes from an organization is more effective when done in video. We saw a video by Boeing where they advertised their Dreamliner so effectively. We saw a video by Turbo-Tax where they attempted to change their brand image by associating a hip-hop song with their video. To generalize, I feel that any form of communication where the sender is "broadcasting" information is suited to videos. I am part of a musical band called "Pratidhwani". We used YouTube to release a teaser video of our show that we presented on Feb 21st. Although we didn't track online ticket purchases, this was the first time we sold out before the actual show day. Here's the video if you're interested (our music was much better than what you'll hear in the video).

I want to conclude this post by saying that there are certain forms of communication that are not well suited to videos. Personal blogs or blogs on abstract subjects like psychology are better discussed in words. Videos have this signal-to-noise ratio problem. When the message one is trying to convey is simple, videos are effective. However, for abstract ideas dealing with people's feelings, written blogs are much more effective. Text also allows more active participation, which is important where complex ideas are involved. For example, I couldn't have submitted this post as a video blog :-)