The Future of Web Video Is Multi-Source Content - Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBloggers

It wasn't that long ago that Web sites had no video at all, or if they had video it was "Single source."

Single source video is best described as video made by the site's staff and with site resources. This is often described as 'premium' video, and generally speaking it is premium both in terms of price and quality.

Single source video was the domain of companies that were already in some significant way in the video content creation business. So, for cable networks who were using existing resources to fuel Web content, single source video made sense. Playing the same content in more places was a good economic way to spread resources.

But for sites that were primarily text, the decision to become major creators of video was costly and labor intensive. Certainly for magazines, newspapers, education and informational sites, the decision to embrace video was a good decision. The question was, could they invest the necessary resources to create enough video to become relevant in the fast moving world of Web video? Sites attempted this in a number of ways, pushing to grow multi-media creation resources, but the costs of creating high quality video remained high – and didn't come down significantly even at volume.

So, in the past 12 months, Web sites that have been seeing increased demand for video content have been exploring a variety of new sources for video. Some have experimented with user-contributed material via contests based on user contributions. Others have begun finding video via embedding. The result has been a variety of hand-built 'multi-source' solutions for sites, but a confusing mass of log-ins and experiences for users.

The need - and the future - requires a coherent single solution that provides both site administrators and site visitors with a seamless multi-source video experience, including:

- Video from the site's pro-content makers;

- Video from site visitors; and

- Video aggregated and curated from across the Web.

Multi-source content, but a single unified and seamless player experience.

Multi-View video is more than a technology, it's a philosophy that reflects what users expect from the Web broadly and from Web video specifically. When a visitor arrives at a site that specializes in knitting, or yoga, or fly fishing - they don't want to just get the three 'perfect videos' made by the site, the want a content collection. The best of the best. And they want to be able to contribute their content too.

The future is simple, and important.

Video will come from wherever the most relevant and useful source is. For weather video, the people nearest to the weather images will be the best source of content. How it's sorted and presented will be best handled by professionals. But proximity will be paramount here. So UGV (User-Generated Video) will grow as more devices that gather video are in the hands of average consumers. For other content types, the mix of pro, UGV, and Aggregated/Curated will be a changing game.

But counting on any ONE source of video will be a mistake - since more sources means more variety and more choice, and will give sites with the best editorial options the ability to build content collections and topical and timely content presentations quickly, often in near real time.

As portable devices become more video friendly, and video cameras increasingly are embedded in all manner of phones, computers, and tablets, the Multi-Source video era is ready to take center stage.

Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO and Co-Founder of Magnify.net - a fast-growing video publishing platform that powers more than 50,000 web sites, media companies, and content entrepreneurs to aggregate and curate web video from a wide variety of web sources. Currently Magnify.net publishes over 50,000 channels of Curated-Consumer Video, and is working closely with a wide variety of media makers, communities, and publishers in evolving their content offerings to include content created by, sorted and reviewed by community members. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur, Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, and well known innovator in the field of user-generated media production. Rosenbaum Directed and Executive Produced the critically acclaimed 7 Days In September, and his MTV Series Unfiltered is widely regarding as the first commercial use of Consumer Generated Video in US mass media. Steve can be contacted at steve@magnify.net Follow Steve Rosenbaum on Twitter: www.twitter.com/magnify

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