Back in the day, Burger King had an ad campaign that was driven by the fact that you could “have it your way” at their restaurants. Remember the jingle? “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce special orders don’t upset us.” At the time that was a big deal. Until then people just ate it the way a place made it, or they went somewhere else. Today, having it our way is the only way. Who would accept anything less? The portions are scaleable too. I can get my custom-created-just-to-my-liking #2 combo Regular size, Jumbo size or Gargantuan. It’s up to ME... and I like that. I bet you do too. As consumers, we all like to have things “our way.” I think fast food chains have done a brilliant job of serving us their “content” in modular combinations and scalable portions. I hope that one day we might be able to offer similar 'portion control' to our viewers.
As a video producer, writer and host of "edutrainment" programs, I have often wished that I could do that for my viewers. As producers, we face a dilemma when it comes to distributing our programs. There just isn’t a good way to create and present a video in a modular format that can be customized by the viewer on playback. We edit video in a nonlinear, random access fashion, but (with very few exceptions) our viewers still watch our productions as linear presentations. They start at the beginning and they have to watch the middle to get to the end. In my opinion, that’s too rigid for today’s busy, fast food content consumers.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could select your own custom-created edit of a video, rather than being forced to settle for the one-size-fits-all option created for a mass audience? I think it would be cool to be able to offer my viewers optional 2-minute, 5-minute and 10-minute versions of a show and let them choose which version they’d like to watch. Sure, I could edit and distribute 3 different versions of a video for a DVD or post 4 variations of an edit to YouTube, but that’s way too time consuming and bandwidth intensive. It’s not practical. What I want is a way to create one edit, the full-length version, and then embed invisible markers into the file to assign commands that would re-direct or re-sequence the show on the fly during playback based on the viewer’s individual level of interest in the episode.
QuickTime, Flash and DVD can all sort of do this, but none of them is meant to do it and none of them makes it a fast and easy process for the editor, nor provides a high-quality viewing experience for the viewer. My hope is that it won’t be long before we see this kind of technology built into our editing applications.
I predict that, in the future, the way we distribute video will have to change to become more viewer-customizable. Our shows will need to become more modular and scalable. Viewers want to watch videos on their own terms; they just don’t know how to order them yet. Until that day comes, they’ll just have to watch what we give them… or exercise their right to turn us off.
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