I believe long videos aren’t, any longer, adapted to the way people use computer based internet. “In the old days” when it took forever to load, you’d see the video through (whilst maybe loading another).

Today you view streaming video strait from click one. So flipping to something else after a few seconds is just natural (just like on TV). There are so many apples to pick and the reach is ever easier.

I have the impression that mobile devices may be a good bet as to where “long conference videos” will be ever more viewed (or at least listened to whilst driving your car, in the sub or gardening…).

For a start you often have your mobile phone when waiting for somthing, somebody, to get somewhere or simply in a room. So you actually have time (once you’re done browsing your mails, twitter etc) you are ready to fill in.

Secondly, the loading of a video is still slow enough to want to “reap from the effort”. Most important the video takes the whole screen so you’re less tempted to look at something else… Well sort of :). Anyway if you are driving you can’t really switch and a nice 20 minute talk is appreciated.

I have found the Lift iPhone app and its good. The problem, for the time being is that a video cannot be downloaded without a Wifi connection… (would you believe it I don’t even have one in my car…). That has to do with the iPhone of course (not the app).

All that to say that: yes there is nearly too much good info out there… given the available time we have to view it. But there are new available time spaces opening up with the mobile devices and, as soon as the loading issues are solved, I believe the audience will be back.

You probably already know this but it is interesting to note that the most podcasted french program is “2000 ans d’histoire” (translates: 2000 years of history) and it lasts 30 minutes every day from monday to friday.

Thanks for posing the question. Lets look at this the other way around. How about finding a cheaper way to produce the videos in the first place? The 30+ videos we’re producing of the International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM) cost us less than $1,000 in total (which includes video animation, soundtrack, editing, etc.):

http://www.crisismappers.net/video

Maybe try leveraging the LIFT community (and beyond) to have folks volunteer their time and expertise? I’m sure there are budding film students out there who would love to be part of the magic and LIFT could be their first break, so you’d be doing good that way too. That’s what Jen and I did with ICCM.

In any case, I agree with the above comments, the videos are integral to spreading the word. On streaming, I for one don’t always have the time to watch an event live online. So putting the videos online a few days after the conference and rolling them out over time allows folks the freedom to watch when we want. This also allows us to edit the videos, make them shorter, etc. Providing a “table of contents” per video may be another way to go so folks can just jump to specific points of interest. Finding other creative ways to drive traffic to the videos is also worth considering. So what if it’s not as “automatic” as before.

I totally agree that we should consolidate view counts across platforms. The vote counts are important user-generated content and sign-posts. I’m no software developer but imagine it can’t be too hard to write a few scripts that pull in counts from other websites and aggregates them on the LIFT (or TED) website. Asking YouTube to do the same might be trickier. But they don’t have to add that the majority of view counts for a certain video comes from Vimeo, for example. They could just have one figure that denotes number of times a video has been viewed on dozens of platforms across the web. This number may actually compel more users to watch the videos right there/then on YouTube, which may be of appeal to the company.

Thanks again for posing the question!