This is New York calling……
When new technologies come along we have a tendency to take them and plug them into our old established ways of thinking about the world.
When the radio was invented in the 1920s, it was seen as a direct competitor to the telephone, which everyone understood. The wireless radio, it was felt, would soon replace the wired telephone as a way to call people, but without the wires.
The advent of the Internet has been no different. Newspapers, magazines and now TV networks see the web as a way to deliver their stuff online and on screens instead of in movie theaters on TV sets or in newspapers.
Not much imagination there.
The real revolutions come along with things like Facebook, which tapped into what the web does really well – social networking.
Now, let’s project a bit forward.
Social Video.
And why not?
Social networking took The New York Times model of how information is created and delivered and turned it on its head.
The Times (and everyone else) was based on the premise of ‘We make the material – you read it – or watch it’.
Passive.
Social Media, on the other hand, is based on the principle of ‘Everyone makes the content and everyone receives it’.
Facebook.
or Twitter.
Now, as the web gets more and more sophisticated, and 4.3 billion people have video cameras in their hands, we can begin to enter the world of Social Video.
Everyone makes it
Everyone gets it.
And why not? (again)
Video is a vastly more powerful and vastly more popular medium than text.
The average American today watches 5+ hours of TV a day.
The average American buys one book a year.
We are a video culture.
But until now, video has been resident (the making of it) with a tiny handful of TV networks.
This is inherently crazy – and it is going to end.
For a long time we felt that the future might be in ‘average’ people creating content for the existing TV networks and media platforms.
Well, maybe.
But the much bigger play here is Social Video.
Everyone making video content for everyone else.
Email replaced by Vmail
Tweets repalced by Veets  (30 second videos).
Is this going to happen?
I think so.
I think it is rather inevitable.
What is it going to look like?
I am not sure – who could have predicted Twitter?
But I think it is going to happen.
And for those who get in early on Social Video, the opportunities are as vast as for those who got in early on Social Media and Networks.
