The future of online Video - Seesmic shifts

While we're on the topic of the Future of Online Video, its worth talking about the future of VideoTwittering (or whatever you want to call it) given that Seesmic yesterday laid off some of its staff (rather than redeploying them, the standard gig of a company in growth) involved in content creation. Here's newly ex-Seesmicer Rachael Joy on the subject:

Thanks and Au revoir!email: rachaeljoy@earthlink.net
twitter: rachaeljoyTV
seesmic: rachaeljoy

Somehow I don't think she'll be under-employed for long

(Update: the video appears not to work now - one assumes it has been pulled, or maybe Seesmic's infamous backend system has lost it )

We noted in this post early this year that the cost / benefit analysis for this sort of media makes it a very shaky proposition (as a pure-play, anyway) as video is expensive to serve and consume vs text or audio (in cost and attention) - thus adding your own own content (at cost) is only viable if it delivers extra value, which in the current state of the market is very hard if there is not an obvious target demographic to advertise to. Videocommenting on blogs hasn't really taken off, for the attention issues mentioned above.

So what to do? Seesmic, Qik*, Phreadz, 12Secondtv have all come into this space recently - and there are probably others that I don't know of. Phreadz to me is the most interesting as it is following Twitter's underlying gameplan of being a Unified Comms system rather than just a video commenting tool - ie it allows upload and egress of a large range of formats, including ones such as Slideshare, Flickr, mp3 etc which makes it useful in a far wider number of use cases. Phreadz also started the "threading" (hence its name) of video conversations, which is darn useful in a largely un-searchable world

Which brings me to the next point - the other things videoblogs don't yet do well, and the one that gets this working will win bigtime - is some form of search / filter mechanism so you can find what you want fast. This is what drove the FirstWeb from an arcane scene of swapping bookmarks to one of being able to easily find stuff. If Videoblogs can't do this, a YouTube+Twitter "good enough" will probably kill them.

The other thing that videoblogs need to do is reduce the load on the listener - only a few people are going to hang around listening to some jerk woffle on for 5 minutes for long. In my view there needs to be the "140 character" limit game like 12secondtv has, and preferably some form of karma/trust rating (will this person waste my time) plus - ideally - a form of transcript.

Attention is precious, wasting it is criminal.

(Disclosure - we're in the middle of a large piece of research on the Future of Online Video, report out next month)

*In the comments, Qik's Jackie Danicki points out that Qik is actually a live streaming service (see a report we did on this use here) rather than a videomail service per se, but I have seen it being used for this sort of application - hence its inclusion here.