The internet is destined to become a fully audio visual medium like TV, but better as people will be able to interact live with each other. The future of the internet will be a video platform. People don't want to have to read as much as they currently do whilst browsing. Our weakness as humans is that we expect information without having to work for it, reading is more work than just watching a video, so we prefer to do that. Already YouTube.com is the second largest search engine after Google for South African audiences and they are not watching YouTube, they are watching a video.
If you want to fix a leaking pipe without calling a plumber, watch a video how to do it. If you want to cook a delicious meal and are looking for a particular recipe, watch a video, if you're looking for health advice, watch a video, if you want to see the latest fashion trends, you can watch a video. If you want to know how to extract DMT from Mimosa Hostilis and use it to awaken your pineal gland, watch a video.
If you have a business and provide a service to clients, let them watch a video of what you have to offer, the same with a product - show your customers how to use your product. With video on the web you can create a better relationship and more trust for visitors to do business with you from your website.
The winners will be the ones that have recognised that people would like to be "spoon fed" information rather than have to work for it by reading text.
Today on YouTube there is tons of this content already, people are able to search on any topic they like and can find out more information. People make their own videos about plumbing and cooking. No matter how good or bad the video quality is, people want information and they don't want to have to read much to get it. Do these videos have your brand on them? No they don't. Brands in South Africa today need to wake up and produce their own content, not for YouTube alone, but for all social media and, more importantly, for their websites.
Even now, before the year 2020, bandwidth has become faster, video is growing and is starting to overtake everything you see on the web. The TV stations are already gearing up for this as well as other major media players in the South African industry.
You only have to look at DStv, SABC and Netflix to see how growth in this sector has already caught on here. The massive investment in live streaming is overwhelming and new technology is created every day. Corporations are all working on video solutions, it is happening all around us with new technology and new hardware being announced almost daily.
Video for the web is more like a TV news or reality news, it is more unrehearsed and instantly produced, unlike your company developing a TV commercial, which has a really high degree of production values, which also comes with a high budget requirement.
This will affect how we communicate with each other. The cost of live streaming and video production has drastically reduced due to lower cost of entry. Companies can purchase very good quality High Definition cameras. You no longer need to bring in expensive film crews with HTML5 video technology as well as software devices like Skype, which exists today, but other software, which will be faster and better. Skype and Google Hangouts will not be the only Apps to be able to run visual communications, it will become normal on every website and web platform. With new hardware solutions, you will be able to see and talk to your customer directly from your website. Or, at the very least, due to privacy issues, your website visitor will be able to see and talk to you. Imagine being able to have a one-on-one live video chat with a customer instead of the usual written word chat.
People want to watch VIDEO instead of reading tons of words, the winners in the future will be the websites that take this into account. Sure, the written word will always be important, but the web is going to be a video platform and nobody can stop it or even want to stop it.
Visual rankings
Search engines will read the video content and your site will rank accordingly. Content on the web will be in the main, how to fix a leaking pipe, how to cook the best roast duck, how to approach your bank manager, how to, how to...
Reading and ranking your content
Even today, YouTube has the significant ability to read the content of any video you upload. Music soundtracks have a digital signature, which can be read for copyright reasons, however YouTube can even read background music played at a wedding reception by the DJ with the main soundtrack of people talking and generally enjoying themselves in the foreground. There is no digital signature on this "noise", however YouTube can read the music. I know because I have uploaded such a video and YouTube pointed out that I was using the exact songs in my video, how do they do that? Profanity is also recognised by YouTube. So in the future, as YouTube is owned by Google, they will rank you according to your content, but this will include your video content as well.
Homeland Security in the US uses technology where "chatter" is monitored across the globe. It's not people listening for this chatter, it is computers that have been programmed to monitor in various languages certain keywords or key phrases and once alerted an operator will take over and examine it. Same as you will be doing on Google by 2020, you will search for keywords and they will produce a list of "chatter" from videos in your keyword search results.
An example of the power of video. Below is a link to YouTube for the Dover Police DashCam Confessional (Shake it Off), although your videos don't have to go viral, this guy has had nearly 27 million views in just one week, and it cost nothing to produce.
Whilst these kinds of videos are exceptional it just goes to show how much interest and how large an audience and opportunity is out there for your own marketing.
