If you haven’t heard of the Flip, check it out - it’s a very simple, high definition video camera about the size of a cell phone. The best part, and why I thinks it’s a game-changer, is that you can buy one for about $200, making the Flip the cheapest, high quality video camera on the market.
But this isn’t a product review for the Flip. Instead I want to share my thoughts on what I think the Flip means to the internet and our day-to-day lives.
According to Flip-makers, Pure Digital Technologies, their product currently accounts for over 13% of all U.S. camcorder sales. That’s over 1 million of these tiny cameras being carried around in people’s back pockets in the US alone (they’ve recently been launched in the UK and Canada). And that, in turn, means a lot more opportunities for people to capture all that is weird, funny and disturbing in this world - in other words, a lot more video of what we (sadly) consider news. This is very cool and for the internet I think it means a heck of a lot more interesting video being uploaded everyday.
So what does this accelerated proliferation in video uploads mean to the way we live?
To illustrate my point, consider the multitude of police beating videos online or the famous video footage of the man tasered by police at an airport who later died. How many more instances of such things will be caught on tape now that people can carry the Flip with them wherever they go, 24/7?
12.7 billion videos viewed online in one month is a mind blowing factoid on its own, but when you start to play with the numbers a little its absolutely astounding.
Let’s say that the average online video was 2 minutes long - that means that US internet users spent 25.4 billion minutes watching online videos in one month.
That’s 423 million hours, 17 million days, 566 months of online videos viewed in the United Stated in one month.
The population of the United States is 303 million, so that means the average American watched 83 minutes of online video in the month of November. With numbers like this its no wonder young bucks will light their hair on fire, throw themselves off a roof and then post it on Youtube.
My co-author on this site, Evan Leeson, has been barking in my ear for years now that “video is king. My witty rebuttal was always: “Yes, but content is searchable.”
Well, I’m changing my tune, content is still king, but I think videos my have just risen to god status.
Just for Fun, Video, viral videos | Kevin Grandia | 
February 28, 2009 9:50 pm | 
Comments 
Subscribe
