IP Democracy: Online Video--What Do We Call All This Stuff?

Emre Sokullu and Richard MacManus have this excellent reference piece that takes a look at the entire online video industry and attempts to categorize the top players. It comes at an interesting time for me because over at Emerging Media Dynamics, we’re in the process of doing the same thing.

And as difficult as it is to keep some kind of orderly track of the top contenders in the online video sector (Sokullu and MacManus have unearthed a few that we hadn’t though of), it’s even more difficult to classify web video sites by the kind of thing they do. For one thing, no good industry terminology has evolved to distinguish one kind of video service from another (say, a P2P downloadable video service that sells movies compared to a site that offers movies for sale but also offers video uploading for its users compared to a site where you can stream movies for a subscription fee during a limited window and on and on).

As an analyst, it’s difficult for me to analyze this new trend without at least some categorization, some nomenclature that makes sense. Sokullu and MacManus have come up with the following categories: —Video Sharing
—Intermediaries
—Video Search
—Video eCommerce
—Video Editing & Creation
—Rich Media Advertising
—P2P (Peer To Peer)
—Video Streaming
—Vlogosphere

It’s a great start at trying to make sense of what is an incredibly fluid, hard-to-pinpoint trend. But, are there better ways of slicing the market (user-generated video versus traditionally produced video, web-only video versus multi-platform video, downloadable versus streamed video)? I’m keen on hearing from folks about how to define the elusive variations in the types of web-based video services that are emerging so that some kind of workable system can be developed that will endure the winds of change, at least for a year or so.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on February 14, 2007 7:39 AM to IP Democracy