When The Kids Go Online Instead of Watching TV

Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser has a good interview up with Bill Rusitzky on some of the demographic shifts that are happening with regards to TV and online video. This obviously has some gigantic implications for RIAs and Flash developers. It’s become a part of culture that we control when and how we view: things like Tivo have made that happen. What’s more interesting however, is how that’s starting to adapt itself online. You get the on demand aspect, but as Bill notes, once people are watching on their computers, you can use other parts of the “computer experience”. You can start to add interactivity to video with Flash, let users choose their camera angles, and adapt the online viewing workflow to the inherent interactivity of the web.

Even now I think video is still seen as a “black box” medium. You see sites like YouTube and it’s mostly about consuming a video clip and moving on. There are a ton of examples on sites like The FWA that show how video can be just another piece of an overall experience which blends seamlessly into other interactive elements of an application or showcase. I want to see more developers start to treat video like another tool in their toolbox when it comes to creating the ultimate application. Hopefully that starts to happen more as people move away from the passive relationship of watching TV in the living room and start to demand that video be as active as the rest of their web applications.

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  • http://renaun.com Renaun Erickson

    We have a old TV to watch VHS’s on and one day we had it on a TV channel and my son said that the TV keeps playing when we turn it off. I didn’t fully realize he only understood the computer and on demand experiences.

    Times are changing.

  • Dennis

    Hi Ryan,

    Completely agree.

    SWSX could be a great place to find these Internet/Television hybrids.

    Two examples of video-based sites :

    http://www.camerawar.tv/

    http://gaza-sderot.arte.tv/ (will be presented at swsx austin)

    Both in Flash.

  • http://phillipkerman.com/blog Phillip Kerman

    Great… interesting… true, etc. But I didn’t catch him saying what Adobe is doing exactly.

  • Dennis

    Phillip,

    I suppose Adobe want to win the coming silverlight/html5/flash video battle

    By :
    . installing the flash player in the maximum of hardware devices
    . helping/funding interactive programs that use video across these devices
    . keeping the cool developpers attracted by others planets (iPhone, c#)