I spent part of Friday attending a business meeting in Japan. I didn’t understand a word of what was said, yet a message of sorts was coming across about where the internet is going. I stumbled upon the meeting by chance as I was playing around with Ustream.tv, a service that enables you to create or participate in live video streams anywhere in the world.
On this occasion, someone was filming the entire meeting on their iPhone and broadcasting it to as many people in the world that cared to listen (in this case 24, including me). There was an instant message text box by the side of the video and when I asked in English what they were talking about someone answered: “We’re discussing how to build a company while we’re university students.” I then noticed there was a link to a map showing exactly where their brainstorming was taking place — at Tokyo Metropolis Shibuya Ward.
Revolution is only just beginning
The internet is, of course, drowning in video and you could be forgiven for wondering whether it needs any more. US internet users alone watched — wait for it — 32,4-billion videos in January 2010, according to comScore Video Metrix service. But the revolution is only just beginning and is already changing direction as it becomes more immediate and communitarian. Websites such as Seesmic.com have for some time enabled live interactive video and the likes of qik and kyte enable you to stream or upload near-live videos from your mobile phones to your own global TV channel. I have qik on my new Google Nexus One phone and it is unbelievably easy to use.
Two new sites that have caught my eye are vPype.com and Create.tv, which are taking video towards what vPype describes as “a place for authentic real-time conversations to happen in a trusted community”. Interestingly, vPype — a US company based in California — chose to launch in London this week because it believes Europe, the birthplace of internet telephony company Skype, is much more attuned to using live video in a conversational way than the US. vPype claims it is different because it streams from “the cloud” (remote servers) giving a more seamless experience and is being launched as a Facebook app giving it access to a live interactive network of more than 400-million people.
Arnold Waldstein, chief marketing officer of the company, told the social media world forum in London this week that vPype is filling a gap caused by “video being used everywhere but not socially”. Who could he be thinking about? Ustream also connects to Facebook and, like vPype, has a freemium model whereby a basic version is free and a more sophisticated one costs extra.
New tools
If video is entering a period of live interactivity then it may need new tools to rise above the blandness of most of the YouTube archive (though other places such as Metacafe and Vimeo have more sophisticated filtering systems). Enter sites like Wreckamovie and Create.tv which enable online video editing. Create.tv, which hasn’t officially been launched yet (but is available to play around with) enables people around the world to cooperate not just in editing online, but also doing storyboarding and all the other things involved in making a film. It is not as sophisticated as stand-alone editing suites, but it is a big step forward for global collaboration. Editing can be done for public or private consumption and it has online mentors to help solve problems and to help the site to spread the word. Create.tv was involved in doing a collaborative film for Oxfam for its climate change initiative, The Wave.
The way things are going it won’t be long before practically everyone has a cellphone capable of streaming whatever is happening around them for as long as they like. We could all have tiny cameras on our spectacles or belts to do just that — streaming our lives to an archive in the cloud. The controversial website ChatRoulette, which links you randomly to anyone else sitting in front of a web cam (as long as they have given permission), is but a taste of the future when everyone will have instantaneous access to almost anyone else. The main limitation at the moment is battery life which some people are solving by linking phones and cameras to a reserve power supply in their backpacks.
There are pluses and minuses to all of this. An archive in the cloud would be amazing tool not only to jog ones memory about what happened years ago (if there is a search engine that can do it), but an historic gift to posterity — if anyone ever has the time to go through it. It could reduce crime, since so many crimes, including personal attacks, would be on video, but at the expense of a huge and unprecedented invasion of our privacy. Indeed, if people accepted all this as they have done for CCTV cameras, we would have to redefine what the word privacy means. Whatever our fears about governments collecting data about ourselves, we seem to be two steps ahead of them in revealing it all ourselves voluntarily. – guardian.co.uk