During the last three years at Brightcove, we've spent a fair amount of time thinking about how online video works as medium.
In the course of looking at this one of the patterns that emerged was the stark differences between how short-form (clip) and long-form (show) video were experienced by viewers and published by content owners.
Clips
Most of the video content on the Web today is clips. They are videos that are generally shorter than 5 minutes and the average viewer watches for about 2.8 min. Clips deliver a wide range of content from cats rolling on the floor shot with mobile phones to professionally produced news segments and million other topics and styles. In general clips are fragmentary. They lack most of the fundamentals for story telling. They have limited plot and very little character development. There isn't enough time for a narrative arc to unfold. All of these aspects helps to explain how clips are experienced.
When a person watches a clip he instinctively place it as a scene in a broader narrative that he has in his head. That narrative drives the choice for the next clip or scene. The viewer is directing his own story, like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. A viewer picks what to watch next as he weaves together the snippets and scenes that make sense in the story that's in his head.
The challenge for a publisher is that she doesn't know the narrative when the visitor arrives at her video. In fact, the person watching the video may not even know where the story is going to go next. These self-directed narratives are radically different from the way classical long-form stories are told.
Lets look at an example. Someone gets emailed a link to a funny video of Paris Hilton stumbling out of a club in LA, and they click to watch it. The question is what do they want to watch next? Well if the viewer is interested in Paris Hilton, then the clip is a scene in that story, and she'll want to see another Paris Hilton clip. But maybe instead she's interested in the lives of celebutants, so she's happy with a video of Britney Spears spilling a latte. Or maybe the viewer is just being entertained, so she's looking for another funny scene, and it doesn't need any direct relationship to Paris Hilton. This can go on and on, and the narrative may change as the viewer watches.
The point of the example is that the key to programming video clips on the Web is to give viewers lots of alternatives with each video for where they take the story next. Let them find their own way, choose their own ending, or at least the next scene in the story.
The other related challenge with clips is that they don't have a lot of intrinsic meaning, so they depend on context. The viewer brings context through their experience and interests, but the publisher can also create context around the clip with descriptive content, comments, ratings, number of views, and other information that serve as indicators or signs of the value and nature of the clip, especially relative to other clips.
Shows
Shows (long-form content) like full TV episodes and movies are a very different experience for viewers, so they have different needs from a publishing perspective.
When you watch a show, you sit back and let the writer and director organize the story. You loose yourself in the characters and the plot, and let it carry you forward. You don't have control over where the story is going, and that's what makes it so enjoyable.
So where publishing clips is all about creating context around the clips and giving viewers options, publishing shows is about creating a great user experience during the show that lets the user loose themselves. If a clip is cut short, it doesn't interrupt the story since the story is in the viewer's head, but if a show doesn't play well, the experience is very disruptive since it interrupts the story and breaks the fantasy that lets the viewer lose himself in the work.
When a viewer finishes a clip, it's never clear exactly which clip he'll want to watch next, so programming clips is about offering lots of related choices. But when a viewer finishes a show, they almost always want to see the next episode (if there is a next episode) in the series because they're captivated by the characters and the want to know what happens next. So programming shows is about presenting each episode in a clear sequence. The viewer wants to know exactly what comes next in the sequence.
Two Forms of Storytelling
Clips and shows basically mirror two forms of human storytelling that are very old. The first is the way we tell stories when we sit around the table in a pub with a group of friends. One short anecdote triggers the next, and the course isn't linear; it meanders as the conversation moves and inspires new thoughts. When a person watches video clips in a well constructed site they have the same experience as they wander through the content choices.
Shows are the classic narratives we've watched and read since recorded history. They are the ancient Greek tragedies and comedies, the stories constructed along the basic lines Aristotle laid out in the Poetics. Putting those stories into a videos on the Web is just a new delivery mechanisms, the fundamentals of what makes a good story are biologically wired into our minds.
The Web has been about clips, so understanding the dynamics of how to program this content well, which we call contextual publishing, is critical to anyone running a website. But as bandwidth and user comfort grows, more and more shows are being published, so sites with the content need to pay attention to the publishing strategies that work for this longer content. Online video will include both clips and shows, and the most interesting sites will offer ways for viewers to traverse between both forms as they are educated, informed and entertained.
Ok. That's it for the theory portion of today's lecture. At some point I'll write a bit more about how these ideas can be applied to create better user experiences and drive online media businesses.
