I Have The Solution for Fred Wilson’s Watch Later Problem
Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson yesterday put out a public call and proposal for a feature he wants to see for web based video. He’s calling it a “DVR for online video,” something that will allow you to “watch later.”
What I want is a video plugin, where I have a little thing on my browser, anytime you e-mail me a link and I see it in Gmail or you pass a link to me in Friend Feed or Twitter, or I see a link in Facebook, or I come across a video, I just want to bookmark it. But what… I really want [is] to … queue it. And then, after I get home at night, after … dinner with the kids and homework, that hour-long time that I have where I sort of lean back, linear video, I just want to go to my queue which I’ve built up over the past day or two and just boom, sit back and watch linear video, watch this video, and then the next thing is some funny clip somebody sent me and then go watch Charlie Rose ..
What Fred is describing, in essence, is podcasting.
Podcasting is RSS driven, pulls the media files down to your storage device of choice, and allows you to watch them at your leisure.
To delve a bit further into this problem, he’s also describing the desire for “veg-factor” viewing, something I’ve been calling for since 2006 for podcast clients and players to remedy:
To illustrate the veg-factor, think about the type of media consumption you do in the morning, while you’re getting the kids ready for school, or fixing breakfast in the morning while you’re getting ready for work. Morning show format news-ish programs are designed for this low-engagement, veg-factor consumption. They’re, in large part, designed to be background noise that delivers some entertainment and utility to your morning.
Likewise, in the evening, you come home from work, you switch on the TV and catch the local news or a Seinfeld re-run, and leave the TV on through Wheel of Fortune or whatever reality program du jour is on this season. Most people won’t even touch the remote until prime-time starts. That’s the veg-factor in action.
Thankfully, a number of boxes and players are starting to address this issue, though far too late to do podcasting as a technology much good. It looked like the new Zune that’s coming out, back April, would address this issue, and Fred points to a Boxee add-on that makes this concept work.
For web video to truly defeat traditional video delivery, this must be addressed, and soon, or risk being relegated to relative obscurity compared to newer emerging technology, as has happened to podcasting.
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