One-Click Rules!

We increasingly live in a complicated world in which those things that can be done in one click get done, and those that can't, don't. And those things that are done often acquire increasing salience. Hence the dominance of YouTube:

Gimme my embedded video! - Download Squad: Jordan Running: This has been bugging me for awhile, and I've just got to get it out in the open: If I want to put a cool movie trailer, a funny Comedy Central clip, or a news clip on my web site, why do I have to go to YouTube, where some kid has uploaded it in violation of the owner's copyright, and where as likely as not it'll be yanked a few days later, in order to do it? I'm talking about stuff that's already on the web--Comedy Central puts the best clips from its shows on its own web site, as does NBC for Saturday Night Live, and Apple.com has all the best movie trailers. But while I can stick a pirated clip from YouTube on my web site with two clicks, there's usually no simple, straightforward way to do the same thing from a legitimate site.

Some companies have shown signs of getting a clue. Google Video... some movies and TV shows--in particular those targeted at the youth market--now have a presence on YouTube... a few big record labels... but the selection remains pretty bare. What troubles me is that there's no discernible disadvantage for companies to put their own TV clips, movie trailers, and music videos online in a YouTube-like way. There can't be a technical barrier--the tiny dev team at Netscape.com put together their impressive embeddable video-sharing feature in a matter of weeks--nor a commercial one--movie trailers are advertisements, as are TV clips.... What's more, if they hosted their own embeddable videos, they could decide what plays before and after them instead of some kid on YouTube deciding for them, and though they'd be crazy to put anything longer than a two seconds before the video, after the video is a great time to advertise, as the Revver folks have discovered.

So, movie studios, TV networks, ad agencies, and record companies, here's my plea: Let me advertise your stuff on my web site. Hire some smart folks to put together a Flash player... give me HTML snippets to copy and paste... and let my visitors see your stuff, and your ads, without the extra clicks and without waiting for your lame Windows Media Player to load.

Comments

[jerry]

Related: blogs that require logins get a lot fewer commenters than blogs that request logins. Other economist blogs may wish to take note.

[Maynard Handley]

"
without the extra clicks and without waiting for your lame Windows Media Player to load.
"

WTF is this guy talking about?
(a) Flash is far far technically inferior to the three other alternatives, Win Media, Real and QT, all of which have, for example, a concept of audio-video sync that actually works, and all of which utilize their host hardware to, unlike Flash, do decent quality rescaling of the video to different sizes.
(b) I have no idea of the details for Real or Win Media, but QT can be embedded in a page with a simple object tag as described here:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/embed.html

I have seen both Win Media and Real embedded in the same way.

This guy commits the same sort of stupidity that constantly pollutes our lives. He wants one thing: content companies to provide him with globs of HTML that will embed their content on his page, but he actually asks for something different, namely globs of Flash content. Dude --- ask for what you want and leave it to the professionals to decide how to deliver it, because you clearly have no clue regarding the technical issues.

Allow me to say one final thing which is that I don't give a damn about YouTube type content, ie trailers and short scenes, basically Jackass for hoi polloi. But when it comes to content I do care about like university lectures, embedded content is vastly more loathsome than content that involves the downloading of a stub file (or even better the downloading of the entire file) because a file based mechanism allows me to view the content in my player of choice as I wish, not forcing me to use some crippled POS mini-viewer stuck on a web page.

[Doctor Jay]

I kind of agree with Maynards point about Flash. But one click usability is extremely important for lots of stuff. Especially short clips.

You've said very clearly that it doesn't interest you. Fair enough. But you aren't the majority market, not by a long shot.

There's a very different paradigm out there. Let's call it: "Let the free stuff be advertisements for the whole enchilada."

So if Comedy Central wants to make its clips available as a way to promote the show, then why not make them available to people to embed in their blogs, or MySpace pages. And easily embeddable. And the easier it is to do this, the more people will embed your content, and the more advertising you will get.

Google gets this. They REALLY get it. That's why they bought YouTube, clearly.

[pseudoswinger]

check out this election-jamming video!!

http://www.takebackthecapitol.org

[ejay]

YouTube doesn't change my settings. At least I've never caught them at it.

And it loads right away.

And it doesn't give me any mumbo-jumbo about Mime the way Media Matters does.

Yay YouTube!

ejay

[Chris]

In a word, SOLIPSISM.

I worked at Amazon.com from 1996-2002, and let me tell you, a lot of people (mainly nonprogrammers) had a giant case of solipsism. They couldn't get their heads around the simple fact that amazon.com wasn't the only website in the universe. So who cares if you had to click through three screens to get to what you were promised on the first? What else are you going to do? Oh yeah, give up and go somewhere else. And Amazon is one of the better companies. No wonder it took seven years to figure out how not to jerk people around. Ugh.

[Jon Fernquest]

"...YouTube type content, ie trailers and short scenes, basically Jackass for hoi polloi. But when it comes to content I do care about like university lectures, embedded content is vastly more loathsome than content that involves the downloading of a stub file (or even better the downloading of the entire file) because a file based mechanism allows me to view the content in my player of choice as I wish, not forcing me to use some crippled POS mini-viewer stuck on a web page."

There's room for both. Short video clips on a blog, like Brad DeLong's blog, add an extra dimension, a face, a persona to the blog. They are another channel for assimilating information through. I appreciate them, but I also realize that it is probably not so well adapted to more substantial fare.

Just to stick up for Flash though, it is much more self-contained and easy to use for elearning content that integrates video, audio, animation, quizzes, than glueing together Javascript and other things. For educators who do both programming and educating, it has proved to be more popular.

[BC]

Flash works on Linux. Windows Media and Quicktime don't.

[liberal]

Maynard Handley wrote, "Allow me to say one final thing which is that I don't give a damn about YouTube type content, ie trailers and short scenes..."

Damn straight. I wish Atrios didn't post all that crap on his site.

[C. L. Ball]

I agree with Maynard for content that I want to use for a course. I want the file to host on my .edu class website or on the (arghh!) WebCT site, which is password-protected and so ensures that fair-use posting is restricted to the students in my class. After all, the other site might not archive the video.

But not all "content providers" operate the way Download Squad says. Comedy Central seems indifferent to pirated YouTube postings in part, I think, because there are so many and they are not well ordered. You need to go to the CC site to find recent show clips.

Others do no want their content stripped from their site. Movie studios want you to view the other films they have out, not just the trailer you want to see. They want you to see their _other_ advertisements. They can push stuff at _their_ sites for better than they can push it in a few seconds before and after an embed at someone else's site.

[Dave]

The only people who don't do things that can't be done in one click are those who confuse ease and urgency with importance.

Let us hope that Pressing The Button, although much quicker than the alternative of conducting an effective reasoned foreign policy, is still not down to a single click.

(among the competing theories for the start of the Great War is that the logistical plan was "the road to Moscow goes through Paris", and any hostilities with Russia implied the Prussians had to very quickly take Paris to secure their rear, with the unfortunate result that once the trains were set in motion, they could not be recalled. The man in charge of logistics was very offended by this theory, and went to the trouble of writing a book after the war to show how, had he been given the proper order, he the entire operation could have been backed out with no worse than diplomatic repercussions)

What's next with the single-click mentality? Nuuuuukes in Spaaaaace?

[Lee A. Arnold]

Why doesn't each company do its own thing? Because: the platforms are converging very quickly into a single hardware product, that combines computer, web, phone, video. (What nobody has given yet, is a single generic name for the device: "Informer?" "Brainbox?" "Connector?") And the only major decision you will be making as a hardware consumer, is what SCREEN SIZE you need: small for in your pocket, big for on the wall.

As for the software, you'll be one-clicking through to everything, soon enough.

So right now the major players would be ill-advised to throw their own money, even a little of it, at software development which will need continuous competitive patches and upgrades, all to make a temporary bridge that will soon be bypassed. That would be insane: Right now, they don't understand this market, and they know it. And they are scared of Google, whom they think does.

Indeed, the major players really don't have that money to commit. They are in bad shape. Their Jaguars and BMWs are two years old! Their bottom lines are depending more and more on income from their backlog libraries. They have only recently and grudgingly understood that a little bit of pirating is good for them, since it constitutes a form of free advertising.

But the majors are being quickly disintermediated in the supply of NEW creative content, at every level but the very high-end (e.g., movie spectaculars and the huge mechanical shows at Vegas or on Broadway.) Independents, in both screen and music, are starting to get financing without them -- and soon won't even need their traditional marketing channels! Try to find a creative talent who really wants to work with the movie studios and record companies.

For the majors, as for the rest of us, the shape and slope of the next trajectory depends on maybe only two things: (1) pipeline size and speed of access; and (2) type of payment system.

Number (1) makes Flash useful for now. But again, as bandwidth grows to become of little concern, these media containers will be forced to converge, and/or be interchangeable -- or else obsolete.

Number (2), payment, will be (a) ad-based revenue (from print ads on the web page or video commercials and trailers; maybe this needs a new single name too: "Crap?"); AND/OR (b) pay-per-view, particularly allowing micropayments -- which introduces the possibility of you having ONE credit account to buy EVERYTHING in the world -- a dumb video, a stick of gum, the Thanksgiving turkey, your next house, ...and being paid in it, too: in other words, electro-money.

Second-party advertisers on video may be loathe to allow 2nd-site embedding, because their underwear ads may end up on Mark Foley's webpage. Micropayments solves that problem for the content-creators, and saves the viewer from having to watch a lot of crap.

[failingeconomist]

I take the points about one click and so on but I think it's a larger failure here, not just this one about the technology. The big companies still haven't got their heads around the fact that much of the web is more like a gift or even a potlatch economy.
Sure, there are people doing all of this for money but the vast majority are doing it for something much more important to most humans: reputation, kudos. It's that which will attract people to your next post, video, web adventure and so on.
Until the big companies get that, sure, issue clips with one click embedding, but more importantly start not just allowing but encouraging mash ups and derivative media then they're really not getting the reputational advantages that this new economy offers.

[shander]

I haven't tried it but, Second Life game... theres and article n the NY times ( http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/technology/19virtual.html?_r=1&oref=login )

takes it another step... not a click but perhaps an expectation on interface.

Also, very interesting tweaks in conmsumption paterns are possible. Not only might the virtual places be a replacement for entertainment product (tv radio news) but the idea struck me that people might choose to work harder in the virtual world to get a virtual pair of shoes than to buy a second or third set of hip shoes in this real world of ours. Sure they need something to wear to work or keep their feet dry... but maybe they'd rather put in less hours working as store clerk to buy at the gap and use the time to flit about on equally frivolous virtual activities.

It won't pay for health care or the mortgage...so theres the "opium den" sort of potentially evil consequence.

Anyway. Enterainment and discretionary consumption probably really needs to think in terms of not only one click but even further ability for the user to twweak the content they're getting or it might seem too dead.