Q&A: How video content became king
A new book by MIT Open Learning’s Peter B. Kaufman explores the history and best practices of video production.
By Katherine Ouellette
How did video become the world’s most popular medium for sharing information? Published by MIT Press earlier this year, “The Moving Image” explores how we got here, why videos are effective, and the key to producing captivating media that matters.
Written by Peter B. Kaufman, associate director of resource development at MIT Open Learning, the book examines the anatomy and production of video, distribution, rights and licensing, preservation, and more. Kaufman argues that media is central to understanding our society today, comparing the evolution of video over the past century to that of print in the 1500s.
“The Moving Image” draws upon Kaufman’s decades of experience as an educator, publisher, and producer. Notably, he founded the publishing house TV Books — which he sold to Lorne Michaels’ company, Broadway Video — and another property, Intelligent Television, that received an investment from Google/YouTube.
Here, Kaufman discusses the power of communicating through video.
Q: Why is video an important communication tool?
A: Video is the complete package — image, moving image, text, and sound. Now almost everyone has a screen, a speaker, a camera, and a microphone in their pocket.
It turns out that human beings may be more hard-wired to process sounds and images than text, anyway. Of the 300,000 or 400,000 years that our species has been on Earth, only 6,000 have involved a written language, and only 600 of those have involved print. For all those other years, we spoke and painted. Before that, we grunted and drew on cave walls, and sometimes, as top MIT linguists and paleontologists have shown, we even sang and chanted to one another live in front of our artwork. That was sound and image, too. (Call it cavecasting!)
Q: How has our relationship with video changed over time? What are some emerging trends we’re starting to see now?
A: In the book, I describe the sudden, almost elusive transformation that the world (or much of it) has undergone as video production and recording technology on phones and computers has rendered this young medium into our new vernacular.
We’ve only had 130 years of the moving image — if you count the start date as 1895, when the Lumiere Brothers first rolled their films for paying audiences in Paris. “Elusive” and “unacknowledged” are words that the great historian of print Elizabeth Eisenstein used to describe the growth of print during the same stretch of time after Gutenberg. One moment, Europe was working off scrolls and parchments, and the next: books were circulating everywhere!
We’re going to spend the rest of our lives dealing with the epistemic chaos that the mesmerizing medium of video has thrown us into. We’re seeing it now. For example, during the 2024 U.S. election, candidates up and down the ballot for both parties spent $6 billion on political ads on television. More than $12 billion was spent across all media. Television received the lion’s share because people with power and money believe that television — the moving image — can sway the will of the people.
And it can. In 2024, commercial advertisers spent billions buying American TV time, and even more on online video ads. That’s because the people who run consumer-facing businesses believe it, too.
Q: Are there disadvantages to video?
A: Disinformation and misinformation are now listed by the experts as the most significant threat we face — ahead of war, climate catastrophe, and poverty. The moving image wasn’t developed to be a truth-telling medium. Print wasn’t either, but over the centuries, we’ve developed an apparatus of citation and authentication that’s been integrated into communication as the basis of law, science, medicine, engineering — you name it. The question we should face is: How do we build a similar apparatus for verifying statements made in video? How do you cite a video in a text? How do you more effectively credit a song, photo, or archival news footage within a video?
For so long now, we’ve watched credits roll at the end of a documentary film or TV program. But when you’re on the internet, those end credits can easily morph into footnotes — with live links to the original source material and further information.
Imagine, for example, if citations and hyperlinks could be embedded directly within MIT Open Learning’s videos on OpenCourseWare. Advertisers are doing that now with product offers on YouTube. Shouldn’t educators take a turn? That could turn a current disadvantage of the medium into a real opportunity for producers and coders and engineers working together, especially here at the Institute.
Q: What helped video evolve into an information-sharing medium? How does MIT Open Learning leverage video to share educational information?
A: “The Moving Image” looks at case studies of key moving image moments in recent history, from the first video ever published on YouTube, to recordings of great poets and writers reading their work for the public, to video capturing evidence of murders and war crimes and political insurrections. The book includes QR codes to the videos so readers can watch along.
I think MIT OpenCourseWare is the greatest free media collection in the world, and it’s among the main reasons I’m so happy to be working at MIT. The breadth, depth, and quality of information in its videos — growing in number now — and other content make it a peerless resource. As we think of applying artificial intelligence to translate materials into other languages, there’s a whole new universe waiting.
Open Learning’s new MIT Moments series is great. Vertical videos are fun and popular. And Brett Paci and Sarah Hansen here are developing a great video series now for Chalk Radio, OpenCourseWare’s podcast featuring interviews with MIT faculty. That said, there’s much more we can do with video, starting with recording even more classroom experiences and labs and performances. Video really works!
