I first started experimenting with video online about four years ago, doing simple product reviews recorded on a holiday camcorder in an ordinary office meeting room and posted online. The quickest way to discover that you don’t know anything about video is to start making some, and it quickly became apparent that this was a whole new discipline that required new skills, new equipment, and new ways of thinking. It also quickly became clear that my future would not be in front of the camera as for some reason on film my eyes completely disappear.

One of the basic principles of online publishing is get something out there before you invest too much time in it. There’s no point in spending months polishing a piece of content only to put it online and watch it sink like a stone. It’s much better to test the waters by getting something up, gauging the reaction of your audience from traffic, links, search ranking, comments, and e-mail feedback, and then use that to work on the next version of what you’re doing.

This is also true in video, where you face brutal competition in the battle for attention. People will spurn your serious, hour-long, in-depth look at the political issues involved in the US election because someone’s just posted a picture of Sara Palin in a red bathing suit at a beauty pageant. As attention spans become ever shorter and the signal-to-noise ratio grows ever more daunting, the first rule of content creation, which is “don’t be boring” becomes harder and harder to achieve. Pick up a camera and you’re in show business, and show business is hard.

A central paradox of show business is that there are rules – but sometimes none of them matter. For example, on one level, the audience has razor-sharp attention to detail for cues that they’re watching poor quality product: clumsy editing, poor presenting skills, and in particular bad sound can be a huge turn-off. So it’s great to try and work to the highest production standards you can afford. At the same time, if you’ve got exclusive footage of the mythical new Apple Brick, or Governor Palin in a swimsuit, nobody cares if your images could be sharper. So should you commit to the trouble and expense of good production values? It depends.

There are then all sorts of interesting presentation problems around video content online: discovery is a huge problem. It’s hard enough letting people know all the great words and pictures you have on your site, but when you add in hours of video footage as well, media management, an easy-to-use archive, and the ability to search via keywords or script content become huge headaches. And while organisations both big and small, from tiny websites to YouTube and Hulu are experimenting in this area, absolutely nobody is really making any money out of this except the pornographers, the traditional first movers in any new technology.

Yet there’s no question that some stories are best told in moving pictures, whether it’s a business demonstrating a product or a journalist telling a story. How can you explain the bizarre locomotion of the Segway without actually seeing footage of it? The most recent issue of Wired (my new corporate overlord) has a nice item on page 36 about a new kind of flash-bang grenade. Apparently the problem with traditional flash-bang grenades, which are used by special forces to help free hostages, is that they’re only supposed to shock and overwhelm people with light and noise. However, the explosives in current devices can harm the hostages you’re trying a save. There’s a new technology which pushes out a cloud of powdered aluminium and then ignites it – creating a nice bang, but very little blast pressure. The mag’s picture is great, but if you want to see it in action, check out the video of the blast.

So what should businesses do? I think they should do what smart people did in the mid-1990s. Get stuck in and start experimenting and learning - but don’t kid yourself that you’re doing anything but experimenting and learning, and don’t bet the farm. Start to figure out which stories on your site, from product demonstrations to internal messaging, are best told with words, with pictures, or with moving images, and start to explore producing content for the audiovisual web. But don’t go nuts, and only invest what you can afford to lose, because none of his stuff is making real money yet. Eventually a real ecology will emerge that allows businesses to monetise consumer attention and bring them together with advertisers who have appropriate media assets, but it ain’t there yet. When people are selling thirty second pre-roll ads in front of one-minute videos, there are a few kinks to be worked out in the business model.

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Michael Parsons is Wired International Channel Manager for CondéNet International. He was the launch Editor of CNET.co.uk, and helped to launch The Industry Standard magazine

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