The Future of Online Video is on YouTube?

Given that we're in the middle of a major piece of research on the future of online video, seeing a piece by Chad Hurley of Google/YouTube on The Future of Online Video was very interesting:

Today, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and we believe the volume will continue to grow exponentially. Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call. This new video content will be available on any screen - in your your living room, or on your device in your pocket. YouTube and other sites will bring together all the diverse media which matters to you, from videos of family and friends to news, music, sports, cooking and much, much more.

Sounds positively Gatesian, but so far this is fairly standard fare for the video uber alles optimists - convergence, mobile and huge penetration and attention! The only way is up:

In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. Even more people will have the opportunity to record and share even more video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world.

And yet this all appeared on a Google text blog.

The evidence to date anyway is also that this scenario is unlikely to be correct - we use different media for different roles. At Broadsight we use economic analysis to predict future technology takeup potential, (seems to work) and the problem with video is that it is quite a high cost medium - creation, aggregation, distribution and consumption all have higher cost than "thinner bandwidth" media. This means that:

- There will probably always be types of communications that are too expensive to do via video (not just in creation costs, but in listening cost - just like voice mail is far less efficient than email)

- Where video is cost effective, it will still compete with media that is cheaper still, and easier to use in some situations

Video no doubt has comms benefits, being a richer media, but it will be a cost/benefit tradeoff when to use it. Existing comms technologies will also improve, and by definition will probably be easier to use than video. In other words, video will probably not be the most ubiquitous and accessible type of communication going in 10 years. That said, it may be more valuable than the others (looking at the value spread in more traditional media) - assuming they can find a better business model than ongoing Google subsidy.