“Content is King” has been touted for nearly a decade as the one axiom to obey when it comes to online publishing. However as time progresses and technology evolves, exactly what type of content is best suited for this job comes into question. For year it was basic text content, such as news, whitepapers, guides, articles and other informative writing. This still remains true in the large majority of cases, but it is started to be encroached by another, more visual, means of content.
Video the New King?
Video content has become more and more prominent on the web. Youtube is now known as the worlds second largest search engine (right behind Google). Viral videos have long been a source of tremendous amounts of traffic and exposure, as well as sources for news reports (take for example, the Arab Spring, with its use of social media and camera phones, and the recent riots in Missouri and protests throughout the USA).
It makes sense that video would be a new medium, since it has only been in recent years that people have had the capability to consume video content with handheld devices. This has made the spread of the medium much more pronounced, and much more quickly, then in years past. The advent of 4G mobile internet has also made this change very pronounced. One has to think that a purely text based media, with all of today’s advanced data technology, has to become sidelined to make way for more visual, data intensive transmission.
Of course, this all has caveats. Surely video will not take over every medium, but for certain cases it seems to make more sense, such as news reports and online education. This brings us to our next point:
Video Lessons and Lectures – The Online Education Takeover
Online education used to be a punch line. It was looked down upon for being inferior to brick-and-mortar institution. People doubted whether online learning could be as effective and face-to-face instruction. However now it is poised to be a 20 Billion dollar industry by 2016, and renowned institutes such as Harvard, Columbia and MIT have funded studies to look into long term online education as a viable option for American academia.
Video is a key part of the online education experience. Video lectures can be done which mimic, and some would argue improve upon, the class lecture of colleges and Universities. In addition, video lessons are now making their way into other learning avenues, such as music education (video guitar lessons are one key example which have seen growth in the past years). Khan university exploded into a worldwide phenomena simply by using Youtube and lesson plans to tutor students and help provide free education.
Conclusion
Video is a powerful tool. It’s not going to replace textual content all across the web, that would be ridiculous. However it stands to reason that it will become a much more prominent method for information transmission, news, and education in the coming years. As mobile Internet bandwidth increases and the access to informative videos, lessons and news clips become more widely available, it’s no question that video will become more prominent.