Video content is the new wave ?

Going over Youtube`success, have you ever noticed how the media content is the new most wanted and most promoted content on the web ? Informations are still there, but you can have them in different ways, not just in a simple web page, with few lines of design. Now you can add an entire photo gallery into a single article, making the page a lot more interactive. A simple module that will allow the user to browse the images in a light and flashy way can cost you a between 100 and 400 kb extra to a webpage and will probabil improve the user experience, giving you the option of making him loyal to your site.

Many reports suggested that ugly sites do better than prettier ones, because they base more on the application that supports the site and not on the frontend, but we tend to belive that a combination between these two make it more attractive for the user. Its nice to a have an ajax based search that will display the results instantly, without reloading the page, than to have a reload for each option that you need to configure to make the search more close to your required results.

So, we talked a lot about the display of the page and how some simple application will improve user experience, now it is time to talk about how video content has affected the market in the last couple of years, since new video sharing portals have developed fast and the internet connections provided to the public users have become more powerful and stable.

When your ISP provides you a strong internet line, there is no problem watching videos online, sharing videos with frieds, even through out social networks like facebook, myspace or hi5, not to mention the use on IM clients like Yahoo! Messenger or Skype or creating your own music playlist directly on such a video sharing portal. You are all backed up by the strong internet connection, so you are using it fully to fit you needs and to have fun at the power of a click. Definately you can see most of the new sites developing using video content, even if the editorial content is there too. Some news sites have used their users to record the news in a video format, display it on the article page and below the article to add the transcript of the recorded version, offering the users the possibility to find the article page in Search Engines like Google or Yahoo!.  Except that, each such article page has a special box for comments that allows also the inclusion of video or images, a thing that will make the pages even more interactive : why not share your own version of the news, if that is possible ?

Also, the video or audio players have become more and more advanced, offering you the option of displaying them everywhere in your site, either as an embed or as a full templating code. You can add the player in the bottom of the site, in the sidebar, in the header, rolling down with the scroll, being opac, having some transparency and other cool features. Is the video content the new wave ? We this so!