They tell us that in the UK alone 32.5million people are collectively watching over 5 billion online videos every month. That’s 166 videos a month (or between 5 and 6 a day) for each of those 32.5 million viewers.  Let’s face it, 166 of anything a month is a lot.

YouTube unsurprisingly accounts for more than half of the videos viewed in the UK with BBC videos (including all the stuff on iplayer) coming in a distant second.

The time watching these all these 166 videos equates to 17 hours. That’s still a long way short of TV. The googlebox still lives up to its name with a staggering 120 hours a month of viewing for the average Brit. But the gap between TV and online video viewing  is closing fast. More importantly I’d hazard a guess that the engagement with the respective advertising from the four hours of daily telly is roughly equivalent to that of watching 6 online videos. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/may/04/thinkbox-television-viewing)

It seems the ever-rising number of video views is accountable to the habit of ‘snacking’ on a sequence of videos. In other words we follow a link to a video we think we might like. Once we’ve finished watching that video YouTube or the BBC suggest several other videos we might like to watch and we just keep clicking. A video ‘snacking’ session is typically 6 online videos in a row.

If we keep going at this rate we’re really only a few years away from the full-blown snacks turning into meals. Mmmmmm tasty.

You’d think people wouldn’t like doing this. After all the earliest adopters of online video wanted to watch premium content for free with no advertising. YouTube’s early success was driven not by user- generated content, but by episodes of Top Gear, The Daily Show and The Simpsons. YouTube didn’t have the right to syndicate this content, of course, so they never placed ads in the videos. Once the big media companies started publishing video on their own sites, they also avoided ads because they saw online video as a marketing channel, not as a revenue-generating distribution channel. Publishing video online at that time was also difficult and expensive.

But the times they are a changing. More and more pre-roll advertising precursors web video. Even YouTube’s getting heavily in on the act for its more popular and commercial videos. This all suggests that contrary to the perceived logic of the mid-to-late naughties people are actually willing to put up with watching ads if the promised video after it is sufficiently appealing. Interestingly some research by Ooyala (who admittedly are a company that act as a middle-man between advertisers and video producers so are likely to promote such research in their own interests in a British-American-Tobacco-smoking-is good-for-you-stylee) suggest that the number 1 reason why viewers abandon a video is not bad content or heavy advertising, but constant buffering – the stop/start annoying-ness you get on videos when your internet connection isn’t feeling at its most perky. Data from tubemogul (the web video distribution company) – albeit a year old now – suggests that at least 16% of viewers abandon a video when confronted with pre-rolls. But again that’s not as high as one might have expected.

Will this trend of serving increasing amounts of pre-roll ads on web videos continue apace? As Zhou Enlai (the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China) said when asked of the impact of the French Revolution, it’s too soon to say. But given that putting ads on videos has the potential to massively impact the revenue streams of small web production houses like mine, do-us-a-favour and keep watching those pre-roll adverts would you?

When Google took over YouTube it was rather the same story there with little direct engagement between the video sharing site and their users. But gradually signs emerged that Google staff were beginning to communicate with the most successful of YouTubers and encouraging them to boost their hit-rates even higher. Recently something of a gear change has occurred with the release of the YouTube ‘Playbook’. Those familiar with American sports will know that a playbook is a Coach’s personal strategy guide from which he directs the team’s tactics for the next phase of the game (known as a ‘play’). So as one can imagine from the title the Playbook is YouTube’s attempt to offer the advice it so far has only shared with a handful of YouTubers, for anyone who can be bothered to download and read the 70 page document. Like me.

So is it any good? Well, certainly for a novice it’s handy stuff. It offers advice like making the first ten seconds of your video exciting and to make sure that you upload regular content to keep an audience interested. But to be honest for any experienced web video types there’s very little in the Playbook that we didn’t know already. What might be a bit more interesting is revelations on the more refined mysteries of YouTube, such as what makes a video with 200 views rank above one with 20,000? But there’s no reference to that sort of thing.

So ultimately YouTube (and by extension Google) aren’t giving too much away with their Playbook. But hopefully this will just be the start of a greater era of engagement and dialogue between You Tube/Google and its users, which will only be good thing for both parties.

Who would have thought that the battle to topple Gaddafi, not to mention the effective invasion of Bahrain by Saudi troops would be completely wiped off the news agenda? The earthquake was obviously a very substantial news story, but its complete dominance of the airwaves was in itself remarkable. This was in no small part down to web video.

The Japanese earthquake was the world’s first mass-videoed-mass-uploaded-major-natural-disaster. It’s a stereotype of the Japanese that they all take pictures or videos all the time, but it’s fair to say that the country that gave us Nikon, Toshiba & Sony is likely to have a few handycams, smart phones and stills cameras on hand at a moment’s notice. As the Japanese are pretty blasé about earthquakes – small tremors are a part of everyday life – when the quake first struck people’s instinct was not to dive under a desk or huddle under a doorframe but press record on their 720p enabled HD smart phone and capture the whole event. It was only as the quake continued to rumble and the ground shook so violently that many people realised how severe the quake really was – yet for many that was all the more reason to keep taping the unfolding scene, and as soon as it was over upload the whole thing to YouTube.

So half an hour after the earthquake hundreds of clips showing absolutely incredible footage sprung up on the internet for the world to see. A small selection are included here.

Buildings shaking violently:

Inside a supermarket:

Inside a shopping centre:

The rolling news channels pounced on the footage. As more and more clips surfaced the networks wiped their schedules to accommodate them. The world was hooked on the story due to footage from ordinary people.

I spoke to an aid worker who was flying out to Japan a few days after the earthquake. Tellingly she said she was now seriously considering spending a chunk of her charity’s money in their other disaster zones on handing out video cameras alongside aid to survivors so they too could capture the horrors of their situation and get some of that much needed attention from the international community.

Although it was for all the wrong reasons the Japanese Earthquake is one of the best demonstrations yet of how if people can see something (rather than just hear or read about it) they will give it their absolute full attention.

We love making series of video podcasts and webcasts for lots of reasons. It allows an audience to get to know our clients and their products or services a lot better and it allows the videos to be more interesting (and better value for money). But it also makes for great PR. Why? Because there are lots of high-traffic websites out there that are looking for great video content to improve their own website. If a company comes along and says ‘I’ve got a professionally made, fun and engaging series of videos that compliments your site and you can have them for free’ – it really is a no brainer for that site to take them. It’s the equivalent of a newspaper having great exclusives written without having to pay the journalists to write them. We’re finding that more and more of our clients are asking us to use our contacts to place their videos to high-traffic websites. A recent example is where we secured a page on the UK food website and a place in the e-newsletter for the podcasts we made with the underground cookery school. This helped the videos achieve thousands of extra views and promoted the UCS business even further. It just goes to show that video series really help you break out of your own website and start grabbing territory and traffic from other peoples’ – especially when you work with us!

OUr podcasts featuring in the UK food newsletter

A canon 550d set up for shooting video

Canon’s happy accident created a light, non-invasive full HD video camera for around £1000 that gave a great filmic quality to its users’ videos. It also opened a world of interchangeable, beautiful and crucially affordable Canon lenses to videographers used to making the most of the one lens in their camcorder.
The Sony EX1 and EX3 cameras are the nearest thing I’ve used that offer a similar video resolution. You can change the lens on the EX3 but it’s an expensive and awkward process. The Sony cameras alone start at about £5000.
It’s not all good news for us DSLR converts though. As the Canon DSLRS were intended primarily for stills photography there’s some functionality that as videographer you’re used to having at your disposal that just isn’t there. Smooth zooms are tricky without buying a big rig with an expensive zoom accessory. Handheld shooting is almost pointless. Even a colleague of mine who had over the years quite justifiably developed the nickname ‘the human steadycam’ struggled to keep the camera-shake off the rushes without the aid of a brace. Sound is an issue. Although the camera can record audio you can’t monitor it via headphones or otherwise. So you either take the risk that the audio’s ok or record sound using a separate device (a decent one starts at about £300). After all these years of pressing one button to activate video and audio recording I’ve been caught short on a couple of occasions: realising I’d neglected to record sound and been forced to retake the shot. Then there’s the warnings, or more accurately the lack of them. The camera stops recording automatically after about 10 minutes and gives little or no warning when it’s about to run out of room on the memory card or battery. This means that recording long speeches or action where it’s vital to keep rolling forces the DSLR user to compromise the finished piece in someway as it forces a cut (no matter how small) in a video that otherwise may well not have had one.
On a non-technical perspective it also means photographers have suddenly realised they’ve got a video camera in their bag and have become extra competition to us videographers. Paparazzi in particular are now shooting video content of celebs
Critics say shooting action is an issue and things like sporting events can cause blurry pictures. In my experience that is simply not the case. I shot a couple of football matches without any issues whatsoever. They also say that once you buy all the add ons really required to make pro rig you end up spending as much as you would on a video camera. Admittedly if you really went to town on lenses, aperture adjusters, mounts, viewfinders, tripods and nice sandwiches for the crew lunch you could easily spend five grand pimping this thing out. But these critics sound to me very much like the climate change deniers of the video world, scared of the new orthodoxy that threatens their comfort zone (and probably career).
But although there are these negative points the pluses are almost too many to list. Details like the memory cards are £50 for an hour’s footage compared to Sony’s £500 instantly come to mind.
In the end it comes down to this. The opportunity to use Canon lenses combined with the 24 frames a second film-tasticness of the camera’s full HD video mode makes almost Hollywood-movie-quality footage possible from a camera that costs as little as one-hundredth of a proper movie camera. That makes up for any shortcomings it may have. Expect a raft of fantastic short films and music videos to be shot on these cameras over the next few years.