We love creating & sharing memories, it’s a basic tenet of our civilization. And as our civilization has evolved so have our ways of creating & sharing memories: from cave paintings of hunts to Instagram posts of our lunch. And for most part static visuals (like paintings & photos) have been the mainstay of our memories. This is reflected in how social web today is primarily about photos.
But there is a BIG change brewing in how we create & share our memories. Just as TV is being eaten up by digital video content as the primary source of entertainment, video is beginning to replace photos as our primary way of creating & sharing memories. And this is such a natural move that it is being barely noticed, even by the current internet biggies (who are mostly busy chasing TV ad dollars with the boom in digital video content). But it opens up a huge opportunity in the social web space.
Let me explain this with an example. Every consumer technology has a simple life cycle. It starts with adoption by professionals, moves to pro amateurs who popularize it & then with the right trigger it moves to the masses & becomes main stream. For the longest time since their invention, photos remained the space for professionals. Remember the photo studios? Then came along Kodak & Polaroid & photos went from the professionals to pro-amateurs. Remember how there used to be a single camera in a family & was used to capture special moments? Then came along FB & internet & like everything else, photos went digital. However the biggest disruption in photos came with smartphones & Instagram. Instead of one camera for a family, there was one for every one in the family. Instead of using photos to capture ‘special moments’, we started using photos to record our everyday life.
Video has gone through a similar cycle except the last disruption part. Let’s quickly run through it. Post the invention of the video camera, it was used by primarily by professionals for TV & Cinema. Then came along camcorders & the pro-amateurs took charge. Remember how home videos became the main stay of creating memories? It became so popular that it spawned popular TV shows like ‘Americas Funniest Videos’. As the digital age came upon us, video too made the transition to FB & YT. The trend of sharing funny home videos (a la AFV) stayed though & gave us the first ‘viral’ videos.
The biggest disruption though will come now (as it did for photos), with the advent of cheap smartphones with high quality video cameras. Now instead of one in a family, each one of us has a quality video camera.
The opportunity this has opened up is immense. Video is on the cusp of making the same transition that photos made from being used to capture special moments to recording everyday life. Instagram owned that trigger for photos & became a storied internet company. Whoever owns this trigger for video will become the next big thing in social web.
It’s not that nobody is trying. Instagram opened up to 15 sec video posts, Twitter launched 6 sec Vines & Periscope/Meerkat have allowed mass video broadcasts. However none of this has yet unleashed mass video usage the way Instagram did for photos.
Who will crack & own this trigger is the billion dollar question?
