Video, video — oh how you’ve changed - The View From Here - Nilofer Merchant

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Wednesday May 3, 2006

Video, video — oh how you’ve changed

video story.jpg

A brainiac Rubicon teammate, Bruce LaFetra did a commentary in our last newsletter on the changing drivers of digital video capture. The premise is that the 15 second shots of video capture on digital cameras made more sense to do than the more difficult to use, more difficult to edit forms of digital video cams.

I hadn’t thought about the topic until Bruce mentioned it, but I thought he really captured a market direction. Most consumers don’t want to become near-professionals to produce a simple home movie or better capture a moment of our lives. Consumers don’t want to master Studio 10 by Pinnacle or Final Cut Studio by Apple, or climb the mount everest of all video editing products, Adobe’s Premiere. Consumers just want to take a shot and then show the shot and have it be easy to share a story.

Related to that, am I imagining it, or does it seem that the blogosphere is full of YouTube (user generated videos posted and shared)? What I think is interesting besides the social aspect is that consumers don’t expect crazy production quality. They like the personal, raw, unedited and real aspect.

And, today, Walt Mossberg does a review of a video camera focused on a radical new concept — rather than creating more features and more complexity, it creates radical simplicity. Called “Point and Shoot” by Pure Digital Technologies, it has a few simple buttons, didn’t require tapes, uses standard AA batteries, and has the built-in ability to easily transfer videos to a computer and convert them into a DVD.

So now that the hardware has fundamentally taken a left turn, I wonder what the software space will yield next. I hope it’s not another behemoth packaged software solution. I hope it’s something tres chic, tres simple.

Categories: Consumer Behavior / Markets, Creating New Markets, Innovation