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Why Does Everything Have To Be Video?

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wraith808:
Ok... no easy way.  Twitch, Youtube, etc, make it dead easy to monetize videos.

IainB:
@Deozaan: Yes, I consider you have raised an important and salient point there ^^. The demand for such things is still evolving, is very natural, real and easily understood, and potentially infinite. The Internet has enabled the release of that demand and its satisfaction on the supply side.
(By the way, I think this is all off-topic and maybe we should pull the salient comments into an appropriately-named thread.)

I suspect that the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee would see that things have certainly come a long way from the CERN scientific
information-sharing system as he probably imagined it when he invented the World Wide Web in 1989. The Internet is apparently one of the largest markets on the planet - if not the largest - and has (or had) no borders. It's ubiquitous.

The embryonic "Internet" - "www", as it was then - initially seemed to be for techos and scientists and those as could read/write - kind of exclusive of those who could not, and effectively a barrier to entry into this New Thing. However, the founders of Google (now become "Alphabet" or something) perceptively and disruptively transformed the scene - e.g., with the acquisition and/or experimental introduction and then promotion of seriously useful email, personal blogging services, "channels", YouTube and various other services. Also, as @wraith808 refers, the introduction of blanket commercial "incentivisation" (enabling "monetisation") to use Internet media such as blogs, webpages and YouTube videos, for example, to carry and disseminate advertising, would probably have been a powerful motivating factor on the supply side.

Some important things were enabled/achieved through the use of the developing technologies, including:

* (a) The technological "emancipation" of the newly-created market - the lowering of barriers to entry, so that now anyone (supplier or consumer) could enter the market if they had an ISP, a modem and a PC.
* (b) A lowering of the lowest common denominator for the messaging in the whole system of communication, so that people with basic or no literary skills could reach out with and be reached through communication at the audio-visual level - which utilise our natural senses - rather than have to try to use an artificial encoding system (text) for communication.
* (c) The collapse of the value-chain in the market, which in one fell swoop wiped out countless intermediate links that traditionally had acted solely as middlemen (adding no real value) in the B2C (Busines-to-Consumer), C2B (Consumer-to-Business) and B2B (Business-to-Business) transactions along the value-chain. This was a huge benefit for consumers and businesses alike, as it improved efficiency and enabled across-the-board cost (and price) reduction for most/many transactions, thus boosting demand (where demand was usually price-elastic) and corresponding supply. Amazon would probably be a prime example of this in operation, having formed itself into a self-regulated near-perfect marketplace (in terms of economic theory), where market entry costs are minimal and where genuine C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer) WOM (Word-of-Mouth) and feedback is generally encouraged/enabled. Ruddy brilliant.
I have a prime example of (b) A lowering of the lowest common denominator in the shape of my now 6 y/o son, who, with no literary skills and just my help, guidance and encouragement, at age 3 began using a laptop and playing online and downloaded games that I directed him to.
Pretty soon, by click-happy trial-and-error, he was finding other games that he wanted to play. Some that he particularly liked (and still does) were "Tower Defense" type games, but at first he couldn't progress very far through the levels, so I found a website that had walk-through videos which took one through successful strategies to win particular levels. After a bit of hand-holding, he was eventually able to independently do this and then go back and apply the winning strategy in a particular level of the game.
Then, after sitting beside his older sister and watching her playing them, he graduated to online games like Wizard101 and Pirate101, and suddenly, to her astonishment,  he was outstripping her achievements, using her wizards/pirates, and then starting on his own from scratch - i.e., he had begun to learn to think critically and strategically how to develop his game characters, without even realising it. This was all through audio-visual media, but at the same time he was incrementally learning to recognise the patterns of the odd useful word or three, and he thus commenced reading, without really trying - because it was useful to know these words for playing and winning a game, so he was motivated by the realisation that he needed to be able recognise certain words. Gradually, his vocabulary and list of recognised words expanded - it was classic learning by trial-and-error through play and experimentation - an instinctive, essential and basic human survival skill. We are all scientists at that age, though sadly it often somehow seems to get squashed during our school years.

tomos:
@moderators (can only mouser do this job?)
would it be possible to split away this discussion (let's see, starting with post #670) to a new thread?
Title whatever, e.g.
'Why Does Everything Have To Be Video?'
as Miles asks.

FWIW not so bothered about this being off-topic, as thinking it's worth it's own thread

mouser:
As you requested  :up:

IainB:
@mouser: Hey, that's great - thanks.   :up:

FWIW not so bothered about this being off-topic, as thinking it's worth it's own thread
-tomos (November 24, 2016, 04:24 AM)
--- End quote ---
Yes, I reckon so too. I find it very interesting and a potentially wide-ranging topic..

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