The Dawn of Visual Networking
Social Networking and Video Make a Powerful Brew
By Roger L. Kay
I remember years ago my astonishment when I began to understand “meta-reality,” the concept
that with nothing other than key taps, mouse clicks, and lit pixels, people were changing reality
far beyond their physical presence. Today, people take for granted that you can buy a Hobie Cat
with a few clicks on eBay.
As the Internet comes of age, we have begun to see many new institutions forming in the potent
nexus of social and technological development. Recently, the rise of Internet video with sites
such as YouTube, Digg, and VideoSift demonstrates that people have accepted short-form, low-
production-value video for its relevance and immediacy. Such sites allow users to upload video
they make or capture while others download it for viewing.
Part of the reason that this distaff cousin of video has taken off is that video in general is a
resource hog, but the short form of it is less so. A compressed digital music file might run 2-6
megabytes. By contrast a high-definition (HD) video file may gobble 13 gigabytes per hour or
about 20GB for a feature-length movie. Thus, an HD movie file could easily be 10,000 times the
size of a track you’d download from iTunes.
So, for now, we mostly have to be content with small grainy videos on the Internet. That’s the
bad news. The good news for the computing and communications industries is that the entire
infrastructure, at the endpoints as well as in the network, will need upgrading to experience
great video.
Meanwhile, on the social side, people have been aggregating in ever greater numbers on
generalized networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut or specialized venues like Plaxo
(business), Geni.com (genealogy), and Playahead (Scandinavian teenagers). Social sites can
trace their lineage from the old bulletin boards, which were geographically limited by the cost of
long-distance phone calls, through AOL, which opened up the geography by allowing people to
dial in to a local number but connect to everywhere over AOL’s backbone, to finally a true Internet-
based system that allowed many sites to bloom as virtual, rather than a physical, networks.
The convergence of these two trends — social networking and video exchange — is occurring
on sites like Stickam, a chat- and posting-oriented site on which people present themselves via
Webcam, and imeem, a site on which people exchange various types of multimedia files,
particularly video.
This rapidly growing pile of video content creates a particular challenge, however. Most files in
the past were based on text, which could be searched and indexed for easy finding. But video
typically has only its title as a clue to what’s in it. So, how do you decide which video to view at
any given time? You don’t wake up saying, today I’m going to watch that kid blow himself up by
hitting a gas can with a baseball bat. You find that video through discovery.
Discovery is becoming a more popular way to navigate Internet content. The idea is that you
may or may not start out searching for something, but pretty soon you’re reacting to things you
find, exploring links on pages you stumble upon and taking cues from fellow surfers about
where to go. Instead of the old, passive, lean-back style of watching video, viewers are activity
seeking content through discovery. People interact with each other, posting comments on what
they just saw. Many sites now allow people to vote on videos, ranking and rating them. Ranking
is the result of one of a number of algorithms that measure how many people have watched
something or how many sites link to it. YouTube is a famous example of how ranking works.
Rating is more specific, involving math that averages individuals’ assessments on some scale.
When you give something four stars instead of five, that information is aggregated with others’
opinions to form a general rating that is visible on the page somewhere near the video’s link.
People also pen verbal opinions in the space provided near video links, giving even more
specific feedback on the content. Viewers tend to discover videos that are highly rated and
ranked. They also click on links emailed or instant-messaged to them by friends.
Video is better than any other medium for communicating ideas and emotions economically. If
a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video may be worth a thousand pictures. In fact,
from a data perspective, a video IS a thousand pictures — one run after the other in rapid
succession, a digital flip-book.
But video differs from music and pictures in important ways. Because video files are big, users
will not likely store many of them on their computers. By their nature, videos are mostly viewed
once or twice and then never again, as opposed to music, which fans listen to over and over.
So, video is better stored in the network and streamed to end users on demand. Also, you may
want to watch a video on your TV, computer, or portable media player, depending on
convenience and lifestyle. Again, video is better stored in the network because transcoding a file
for a particular device is compute- and time-intensive. If the transcoding is done in the network
by powerful servers, the bits can be streamed down to any device from there.
Two companies that have an interest in visual networking are Cisco, the king of “data in flight,”
and EMC, the king of “data at rest.” Cisco, which supplies, among other things, networking
equipment, stands to gain as the network is built out to accommodate this giant heap of video
content, and EMC benefits from the demand for not only disks on which to store it all but also for
information management systems that decide intelligently where to keep it.
Stay tuned for further developments: we’re right at the beginning of the visual networking era.
© 2008 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
that with nothing other than key taps, mouse clicks, and lit pixels, people were changing reality
far beyond their physical presence. Today, people take for granted that you can buy a Hobie Cat
with a few clicks on eBay.
As the Internet comes of age, we have begun to see many new institutions forming in the potent
nexus of social and technological development. Recently, the rise of Internet video with sites
such as YouTube, Digg, and VideoSift demonstrates that people have accepted short-form, low-
production-value video for its relevance and immediacy. Such sites allow users to upload video
they make or capture while others download it for viewing.
Part of the reason that this distaff cousin of video has taken off is that video in general is a
resource hog, but the short form of it is less so. A compressed digital music file might run 2-6
megabytes. By contrast a high-definition (HD) video file may gobble 13 gigabytes per hour or
about 20GB for a feature-length movie. Thus, an HD movie file could easily be 10,000 times the
size of a track you’d download from iTunes.
So, for now, we mostly have to be content with small grainy videos on the Internet. That’s the
bad news. The good news for the computing and communications industries is that the entire
infrastructure, at the endpoints as well as in the network, will need upgrading to experience
great video.
Meanwhile, on the social side, people have been aggregating in ever greater numbers on
generalized networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut or specialized venues like Plaxo
(business), Geni.com (genealogy), and Playahead (Scandinavian teenagers). Social sites can
trace their lineage from the old bulletin boards, which were geographically limited by the cost of
long-distance phone calls, through AOL, which opened up the geography by allowing people to
dial in to a local number but connect to everywhere over AOL’s backbone, to finally a true Internet-
based system that allowed many sites to bloom as virtual, rather than a physical, networks.
The convergence of these two trends — social networking and video exchange — is occurring
on sites like Stickam, a chat- and posting-oriented site on which people present themselves via
Webcam, and imeem, a site on which people exchange various types of multimedia files,
particularly video.
This rapidly growing pile of video content creates a particular challenge, however. Most files in
the past were based on text, which could be searched and indexed for easy finding. But video
typically has only its title as a clue to what’s in it. So, how do you decide which video to view at
any given time? You don’t wake up saying, today I’m going to watch that kid blow himself up by
hitting a gas can with a baseball bat. You find that video through discovery.
Discovery is becoming a more popular way to navigate Internet content. The idea is that you
may or may not start out searching for something, but pretty soon you’re reacting to things you
find, exploring links on pages you stumble upon and taking cues from fellow surfers about
where to go. Instead of the old, passive, lean-back style of watching video, viewers are activity
seeking content through discovery. People interact with each other, posting comments on what
they just saw. Many sites now allow people to vote on videos, ranking and rating them. Ranking
is the result of one of a number of algorithms that measure how many people have watched
something or how many sites link to it. YouTube is a famous example of how ranking works.
Rating is more specific, involving math that averages individuals’ assessments on some scale.
When you give something four stars instead of five, that information is aggregated with others’
opinions to form a general rating that is visible on the page somewhere near the video’s link.
People also pen verbal opinions in the space provided near video links, giving even more
specific feedback on the content. Viewers tend to discover videos that are highly rated and
ranked. They also click on links emailed or instant-messaged to them by friends.
Video is better than any other medium for communicating ideas and emotions economically. If
a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video may be worth a thousand pictures. In fact,
from a data perspective, a video IS a thousand pictures — one run after the other in rapid
succession, a digital flip-book.
But video differs from music and pictures in important ways. Because video files are big, users
will not likely store many of them on their computers. By their nature, videos are mostly viewed
once or twice and then never again, as opposed to music, which fans listen to over and over.
So, video is better stored in the network and streamed to end users on demand. Also, you may
want to watch a video on your TV, computer, or portable media player, depending on
convenience and lifestyle. Again, video is better stored in the network because transcoding a file
for a particular device is compute- and time-intensive. If the transcoding is done in the network
by powerful servers, the bits can be streamed down to any device from there.
Two companies that have an interest in visual networking are Cisco, the king of “data in flight,”
and EMC, the king of “data at rest.” Cisco, which supplies, among other things, networking
equipment, stands to gain as the network is built out to accommodate this giant heap of video
content, and EMC benefits from the demand for not only disks on which to store it all but also for
information management systems that decide intelligently where to keep it.
Stay tuned for further developments: we’re right at the beginning of the visual networking era.
© 2008 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Pass Me That Video, Please
 |
| |
 |