Video is Eating the World!
Written text has been the primary communication weapon throughout our history. It has served its purpose well to preserve our history, to share knowledge and create wonders. However, there is no denying that it is on the verge of extinction because of the recent explosion in Video communication. The 21st century is dominated by the Video content compared to any other form of communication tools. It is on its way to become the only preferred medium for humans to interact with. Let us see how Video is taking over text, how Video is dominating the Internet, and how Video is eating the world!
A Brief History of Video Communication: It’s been more than a century since the first capture of a (analog) Video and its use for entertainment. While the primary use of this Video content was purely for entertainment, the overarching goal was to communicate and express whatever we wanted to convey to the people. But this was constrained to very local neighborhood. It was not yet meant for long distance communication such as written letters until recently. By mid 20th century, Television has made it possible to communicate and influence people over long distances using analog Video. Soon digital Video started to emerge but couldn’t compete with the analog Video until the invention of Video compression technology in late 1980s. This ability to visually and more appealing way to convey the message over long distances has created a revolution in Entertainment, Education, Business and in many other sectors where the written text is considered to be boring and less attractive.
Explosion in Video Technology: The idea of creating and sharing the Video content was not a thing until the early 2000’s, when YouTube, an online platform redefined the way we access the Video content using Internet technology (all thanks to Video Compression). Quickly, it started to explode Internet traffic because the YouTube platform allowed anyone in the world to upload the Video content (almost any type of content and however much you want to upload). Within a decade, the Internet is drowned with Video traffic. Look at the today’s Video share of the total Internet traffic (below Figure ). The Video content production has surpassed the advancements in the Internet technology itself. The demand for Video has never been so much more. Today, the Video technology has the capability of capturing an ultra high spatial and temporal resolution Video, with almost no limit on the number and duration of Video content, with more than half of the world population pushing the content over the Internet everyday.
To illustrate with some numbers, imagine a raw Video with 1920x1080 pixels in each frames with 30 frames per second display in RGB format (i.e., 4:4:4 color space) and a bit depth of 8 for one minute duration. This boils down to approximately 10GB (1920x1080x3x8x60x30/8/1024/1024/1024) of data for just one minute duration. This is just a FullHD Video for one minute. What about UltraHD Videos such as 4K and 8K? with millions of people making Videos and uploading online everyday? Imagine transmitting hours of such raw data transmitted over the Internet, you will be waiting for hours and hours to watch a few minutes of your Netflix movie or wait for a couple of days to completely download the movie so you can watch it locally. However, a huge thanks to the Video compression technology developed in mid 1980s, this enormous amount of data can be reduced by a miraculous 2000x compression ratio with a standard lossless Video compression on average (the previous 10GB would become 5MB for one minute duration).
This is just a beginning. Until the past two decades, only a few professionals or a big organization used to create and distribute the content. Whereas today, anyone from a random eight year old kid to a ninety year old grandma is producing content and reshaping the definition of Video communication with a single click over the Internet. Thanks to the ubiquity of online platforms (such as YouTube, TikTok etc), creating, sharing, and communicating through the Video content has never been so much more easier.
Video - a Weapon for Tomorrow’s Communication: Almost none of the humans before the millennials generation had their education by watching a Video lecture over the Internet. However, majority of millennials and the Gen Z are investing more of their time on watching Videos to learn, to teach, and to entertain and for many other activities today.
I am writing a blog today to communicate the same, but tomorrow I would rather use my smartphone to capture a Video of the exact words, and upload it on the YouTube or TikTok platforms. It is easier for me to speak and create a Video than writing an essay. And I bet it is much more appealing to watch the Video over reading this long boring text. One thing for certain that the today’s generation is learning more from Video content than from the traditional written text books (check, the consistent decline in the number of readers over the years[4]). This shows that Video is becoming an effective communication tool than anything else. Thinking seriously about it, how Video is influencing us, how much of our time is being spent on Video, what Video can do and it’s potential, I would not be surprised if Video can replace written text or any other form of communication in the near future. Maybe a few hundred years, no anytime further. We will only be remained with Video books, Video magazines, Video lectures, Video news, Research related Videos instead of papers and articles etc.
All this time, I have been talking about a mediocre half-duplex Video where you cannot even interact with it. Now, imagine its potential when you can interact with it. Think about the AR/VR and the mixed reality content with ultra fast Internet speeds. What happens to millions of Web pages with all the text, if you are given an interactive Video where you can watch, click, scroll and get all information that you are interested in? What happens to all the e-commerce and banking websites, if you can interact with your Bank completely through a Video? Isn’t it cool if you could communicate with anyone in the world in a blink of eye rather than writing and then reading which takes a lot more time? In the next few decades there will be numerous Video applications that will lead to fewer blog posts, fewer text advertisements, fewer text books, and fewer any other text based resources. However, the unintended consequences (e.g., climate change or mental affects) of the Video traffic over the Internet are not studied in detail yet. We have long way to understand its net benefits compared to the written text communication as it requires at least one human generation of data, but it will for sure take over the text and create a new world that we have never imagined before.
Video is Eating the World — Mallesh
