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Zuckerberg: Most of Facebook Will Be Video Within Five Years
jfruh writes: Facebook recently held its first ever town-hall meeting in which Mark Zuckerberg took questions from the general public, and one of his answers might raise some eyebrows. When asked if the increasing numbers of photos being uploaded might strain the company's servers, he said the infrastructure is more than up to the task, because they're preparing for the notion that "in five years, most of [Facebook] will be video."
That is actually pretty hilarious, about video phones. It was supposedly, for decades, one of the greatest new features that couldn't be done well for bandwidth and equipment cost reasons, and when finally everyone had a 4G phone with a front-facing camera, we found that nope, nobody cares about video phones.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
>Zuckerberg/Facebook thinks we're going to have "conversations" with video snippets?
No, he expects Facebook users are going to have conversations with video snippets. This has nothing to do with the general population. He's judged his users well enough so far, so there's no reason to believe he's mistaken now. I expect that a lot of people are going to move into VR for their conversations, which means routing and likely storing massive amounts of video.
Why do you think all the TV networks have embraced putting TV shows online? Because they realize they can put ads on the stream and the user has to sit through them (or go to the bathroom). Either way, they can't fast forward through them like they can on a DVR.
...except that in my case, I block the paths to the ad-content streams. You know what happens? Video stream loads, html5/flash then goes to the "insert ad" code, gets no response, and moves on to the next queued stream, until the next in the queue is the non-ad video. This means that where others get ads, I get about 3 seconds of spinners. I could probably write a greasemonkey script that would flat-out scrub references to those streams from the code so that playback is seamless -- AdBlockPlus, Ghostery and NoScript plugins already do that for me in some situations. I didn't even realize YouTube had ads until I was shoulder surfing someone's iPad....