Have you uploaded yet?
The other day, my friends and I realized we hadn’t gone to a video store and rented a movie in almost a year. It’s kind of a nostalgic idea actually, the days when your mom would take you to Blockbuster to rent something by Adam Sandler, or maybe Space Jam for the 500th time. Blockbuster just closed actually. It closed not long after Mr. Movies shut its doors.
We thought about the reasons why, and we realized it was a number of causes that culminate into the idea that the industry is changing. Video consumers want video on demand. They want to watch it now, and they want it for cheap, (or for free). Take Redbox for example. They drop off a Redbox machine at the local grocery store and soon its $1 DVD rentals muscle out the big names like Blockbuster.
Then there’s Netflix- who wants to drive to a movie store when they can be uniformly sent to your front door? But perhaps the greatest influence on this change in industry is something that Netflix quickly picked up on – the Internet. The Internet is the new home for all video, and quickly becoming the new home for feature length cinema. By providing an online database of shows, movies and specials to be watched at any time, who wants to pick up a movie from the front door when all you need is the remote and internet connection?
And then we venture into the free realm. Hulu provides numerous shows to viewers online for zero cost. YouTube houses millions of videos, uploaded by anyone and everyone, viewed by anyone and everyone, with no cost to anyone and everyone. So I guess what it really comes down to is this: if you have a video or a commercial that you want people to see, and it’s not online, it’s probably time to upload.
