Have We All Become Everyday Paparazzi?
May 5, 2010
Mention the term “paparazzi” and most people react negatively. Yet, the advent of low cost cameras, camera phones, and pocket camcorders has turned the common man into the everyday paparazzi. The proliferation of photos and videos on the Internet has been extraordinary. Flickr has more than four billion photos and Flickr is just one of dozens of photo sharing sites. YouTube has passed the milestone of 24 hours of video being uploaded every minute.
To put this into perspective, according to the Nielsen Company, in December 2009, there were almost 6.5 billion video streams viewed on YouTube by 105 million people. Hulu was a distant second with 634 million video stream viewed by 13 million viewers. Yahoo! was in third with 243 million video streams and 27.5 million viewers. According to Internet World Stats, there are 6.7 billion people in the world, there are 1.7 billion Internet users worldwide and the Internet is used by only 25.6% of the population. In December alone, there was a video stream viewed by every person on this planet!
At many business meetings, there is always a photographer and a videographer at the event. They are filming and snapping photos continually. The photos are uploaded onto to Flickr and the organization’s website. They don’t select a few good or representative photos, it’s all uploaded. There nothing less interesting than viewing second-by-second photos of a panel of geeks discussing some technical nuance. The speaker’s hands more one way and then another, the speaker’s head tilt to the right and then to the left – each movement captured on film. The photographers don’t stop at the presenters either. There is usually another who is snapping second-by-second photos of the audience. So while I love technology, my digital camera and my video camcorder, I think we have all gotten carried away with video and pictures.
In this era of the Clean Tech and Green revolutions, consider the consequences of this many videos and photos. It was once thought that the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) would be a minor player in reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and global warming. Two recent studies have shown that ICTs have a greater impact on GHG emissions than previous thought. The ITU estimates that ICTs contribute 2% to 2.5% of GHG emissions and the EPA estimated that data centers account for 1.5% of U.S. electricity consumption with federal data centers account for approximately 10% of this usage.
So, where is all this technology headed? Most believe that video on the Internet is in its infancy and there is a lot more to come. Cisco Systems acquired Flip Video to help drive consumer generated content, thereby requiring Cisco’s products to provide more storage for all this content and greater bandwidth to deliver it to the viewers as quickly as possible. Several start-ups are trying to solve the problem with searching all this content. BurningEyeDeas (www.burningeyedeas.com) has developed a hyper-imaging technology that will do for images on the Internet what hypertext did for the written word – making images and video more searchable by the individual elements within the frames and pictures. Likewise, a startup, GazoPa (www.gazopa.com) is seeking to make images more searchable through means other than the traditional keywords attached to those pictures.
Over the past few years, nations everywhere have been formulating their national broadband plans as the Internet has been deemed crucial to the economic growth and wellbeing of countries around the world. In each of these plans, the incorporation of video is one of the top priorities. With another 75% of the planet’s population still not connected, there is a lot of growth potential in the use of online video and images. While news stories often report on the number of cars on the highway and its effect on the environment, they may soon be reporting on the amount of content flying on the information superhighways and its impact on the planet as well.
Filed under: Technology News
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