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Are Video Blogs Ready For Prime Time?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the be-your-own-nina-pineda dept.

Markmarkmark writes "Is video blogging ready for prime-time? Can Internet talking 'blog-heads' beat the talking heads on Fox? Is the next Andy Rooney-type commentator going to be a /.er? With new technology and a little creativity, this MSNBC article today thinks so. 'The big problems have been setting up lights and a camera in my study properly, so that I don't look dead, or hung over.'" The article is about the software / hardware it takes to set up a microstudio; the author does not really explore much about the video-blogging implications -- but you can.

5 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. A Day in the Life of a Geek? by Kombat · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Come on, with all the far more provocative reality TV out there (viewers choosing a spouse for someone, 16 whiny crybabies dumped in the Amazon, a dude pretending he's a millionaire), who's gonna watch Linus recompile his kernel?

    Is it possible that this whole "blogging" craze has been the fastest flash-in-the-pan to hit the technology world yet? Dare I dream that the even the uber-geeks and posers have already come to the conclusion that "hey, you know what? I'm not really that exciting, and nobody cares what I had for breakfast today"?

    "Blogging" has graphically illustrated for me the old adage, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you shouldn't."

    --
    Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
    1. Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek? by PyroMosh · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Anyone else think that this article sounds like a Jon Katz article ? The way it tries to predict the future while sounding like it's got some great insight to the social signifigance of technology without actually understanding said technology? In my mind, he's a bit like the way some people describe Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh. I can't stand him, I think he's an idiot, but I miss him! What ever happened to him?

      Of course Video Blogs aren't the wave of the future. At least not the near future. It would be high bandwidth instead of low, it wouldn't be easily searchable or easy to catalog. It's an order of magnitude harder to do with no tangible benefits except for a little bit of "cool factor".

      --
      Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
    2. Re:A Day in the Life of a Geek? by squaretorus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Blogging sucks. No blog is going to attract millions of viewers a day. But a million blogs might.

      Give me a service where I can hook up a text, picture, and video connection with my 'posse' and if I'm egocentric enough I'll take it.

      The only blogs to make it into the mainstream - i.e. attract a wider audience than their network of friends - will have a tabloid interest - nudity, offensiveness, extreme views, or some other rally call. No offence to that special breed of /.er who have 'popular' journals. But look at the content - hardly recommendations for new distros!

      Personally I don't want my 'pub rants' preserved to be thrown back at me in 20 years time when Im up for head of the city council and one of my opponents wants to raise my past life as an ecoterrorist.

  2. Re:OK... by DeadSea · · Score: 4, Interesting
    So lets figure out how much video blogging will cost. Lets say that you produce a 10 minute peice a day, and that 500 people tune in each day. Lets say that you put your video in a postage sized window and it comes out to 1MB. Thats half a GB a day.

    The current rates for bandwidth at this scale are about $1/GB of transfer. You will be spending about $180 a year for bandwidth for just 500 people. By contrast, you can get a text blog out to 4000 people a day for $50 a year (easily).

    Even then your blog is going to be low production quality, low recording quality, low compression quality, and in a postage stamp sized window. I wouldn't watch your blog.

    Maybe the 500 person thing is a bit to high given that nobody will watch. But say your blog does get popular. You will be spending 35 cents for every person that views a 1 MB download every day for a year.

    My back of the envelope calculations show that video blogging is not ready for primetime.

  3. Re:Oh Really? by angle_slam · · Score: 5, Interesting
    instapundit.com (Glenn's original blog) has topped 200,000 daily visits on at least one occasion, and his readership is growing monthly. His fellow top-teir bloggers boast similar numbers. And they're just talking about boring ole' politics and such.

    There is obviously a large market for political writing, which is why such blogs are so popular. You don't have to read the same columnists over and over again, as political blogs contain many new voices and links to all sorts of news stories. Instapundit.com mainly contains links to other stories. But check out all the links to other blogs on the left side of the page. You have some blogs, like USS Clueless, that present lengthy analysis of the upcoming war. In the legal world, a blog about appeallate law, How Appealling is among the most popular blogs, but there are many legal blogs (sometimes called blawgs), as you can see from the compilation on Bag & Baggage. The key to these blogs I listed above isn't necessarily the content (and none of them are "what I did today" type blogs), it is the links to other stories.