There are close to 900 billion videos being uploaded every year. That, by itself, tells us the scope of this platform which is on the rise. With everything moving so fast, can one really predict anything? In the future, will it all be about Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality? Who knows? But one thing is for sure, in ten years, everything will be in a video-based format.
The industry of content creation for the visual medium right now, as opposed to what people think of it, is a very structured and an organised one, with multiple players within it. The advertisers and creators have created a very organised ecosystem which is getting better and better by the week, not even months or years.
The world will increasingly move towards video. And what is already popular in the form of videos will emerge with much higher quality. Take for example media and journalism. In a few years, the news industry may not exist in the way we know it today, But journalism as a career will continue to exist, except it will be consumed in different formats. And as we can already see the signs, it will adopt a video-first approach too. Video avenues will exist to create content for people who still seek the truth. Now, media and journalism is an example of just one industry which will leverage the platform of video and concentrate on developing content for it.
Another example is messaging, or what is more colloquially known as texting. This is a platform which is mostly text-based, barring the emoticons, pictures and voice notes. It too will move towards more and more video-based content and not just in terms of people talking through video calls. In fact, we already see that happening with the new iPhone X which has introduced an Animoji feature in iOS 11. Animoji is the animated version of existing emoticons. It uses the Face ID hardware face-scanning features and your own facial expressions to create custom 3D versions of Animoji. This is easily one of the first steps towards communication through video as opposed to text.
The challenge here is the content, which everyone has a different perspective on because the whole medium is very personal — what you like I may not like. It is very individualistic. But there are videos in almost every genre. From tutorials to simple humour and many more genres — there are millions of hours of videos that are being uploaded almost every day. Basically, it is a great time to be a content creator, but it is also very hard to make a business out of it because to balance expectations, in terms of figuring out how to be different, becomes very difficult. It is easy to create content — so easy that almost everybody around the world is doing it. Standing out in this field is a tough thing to nail. So, to make money out of the platform not only do you have to make your content more individualistic and approach themes that others are not already dabbling in, but you also have to look for new niches.
This doesn’t defeat the fact that it is a very viable field. A person who is inclined towards the field of arts and wants to be a storyteller can be relevant for a long time on this platform.
(Sameer Pitalwalla is the CEO and Co-founder of Culture Machine, a digital media company. He co-founded Culture Machine in early 2013 along with Venkat Prasad with a vision to use technology and storytelling to help build and create great media brands that people love. Prior to the inception of Culture Machine, Pitalwalla headed the digital media business at Disney India and worked with other leading media houses in India. Today, Culture Machine’s network includes several prominent channels like Being Indian, Blush, Put Chutney, Viva and Awesome Sauce to name a few. Culture Machine’s core technology platforms are Intelligence Machine, Video Machine, and Business Machine and they cater to the mission of data backed content creation for their clients as well as for a general audience that is widespread and far-flung in a truly Indian context)
