Blogs, Podcasts and small-screen video blogs have one thing in common, which explains their phenomenal success: they allow the creative individual to express him or herself with minimal technical overhead. Let's face it: production values in our modern, super-sophisticated media environment have become such that it usually takes a small army and the gross revenue of a minor nation to produce any of the popular, widely distributed media formats. Even the lowly web-site nowadays needs programmers, designers, flash-experts, database managers. This puts the creative individual in a terrible situation: if you want to make a difference and can't find a producer for your ideas, you'd better find a motivated team that thinks like you, and doesn't mind working on spec.

It is therefore not surprising that the emergence of the iPod-driven small-screen video format as potential outlet for personal creativity is spawning so much excitement around the world. Here is a new medium that has no rules (yet); even better, most of us probably already own the tools necessary to produce content for this new platform (just combining a few still images in iMovie with voice-over can be enough to produce intriguing results).

The most stimulating part, however, is that this new medium is crying out for a redefined creative language. Just as the movies at first imitated theater, and television copied cinema, small-screen video is starting out by down-sizing what worked on television. Sure, some of that works—sort of. But once you have watched a few episodes of Tv programs on your iPod, and downloaded the current crop of video-podcasts, it becomes painfully (or excitingly) clear that the language for this new medium has yet to be invented.

What works on blogs and podcasts (personal opinion, expressed in words) feels surprisingly lame when you add video to the mix. Producing professional-quality video is tough, much tougher, in any case, than producing acceptable sound-recordings. It is definitely much harder to look good and at ease on video than simply sounding articulate in a podcast.

This is in part due to the fact that we haven't figured out what works well on such a small screen. Podcasts took off so rapidly because we can listen during time -consuming activities such as commuting or working out at the gym. Video content is different: it needs to be interesting and engaging enough to warrant ALL of our attention, rather than just listening while doing something else.

The next few years will see an explosion of new content: once we have realized that this is not just TV on a small screen, there is ample room for experimentation—and interesting opportunities for software developers to boot.

And while the size of iPod screens is likely to increase on future models, once the market has fully embraced the idea of video on a hand-held device (which seems to be happening at the rate of millions of downloads, looking at the sales statistics of the iTunes store), small screens are not going to go way: video-capable cell-phones will keep using comparatively small displays, in order to keep the devices manageable as phones, and not only as portable media players.

From a creative perspective, the most interesting angle remain video or animated blogs. Just as blogs have found their appropriate format and do not try to look like magazines or newspapers, visual (rather than video-) podcasts are the way of the future. We will just need to realize that the best way to look credible on a video iPod is NOT to try and imitate David Letterman or the Daily Show.

There is a LOT of potential here. We are going to exciting times for creatives—and for the audience as well…

Andreas Pfeiffer
(posted December 12, 2005)

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