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E-conomy / Paul Andrews
Web's video progress is slow motion

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But there's one form of publishing where the Net is still in its figurative Dark Ages — where posting is problematic, resolution is poor and speeds are painfully slow. I'm talking about video. The Net seems to carry a subtle bias against it.

On the production side, video is bursting with innovation. Digital camcorders are almost as small and light as digital cameras (some of which offer limited video capability as well). The better camcorders contain near-professional features and output.

Editing tools, led by iMovie on the Macintosh, have moved forward from crude beginnings as well. And you can easily transfer your video to a DVD (or even VHS) for playing on a TV or computer.

But if you want to post the video on the Web, as you would with, say, a blog entry or photos of your vacation — well, you're asking for trouble.

The problem is that video consumes a lot of bandwidth. A typical 3- to 5-minute clip can run 10 to 20 megabytes in low-resolution form. You can't send it as an attachment, because most Internet service providers put a cap of 5MB on e-mail size (many are moving to 10MB, still not enough).

Some ISPs permit you to post a video on the personal Web site they toss in with your monthly subscription. But the display is usually pretty poor, and in any case ISP storage limits you to a clip or two at a time.

Web logs aren't much better. Most don't do video at all. My TypePad blog permits me to post multiple clips because I pay extra for storage. But TypePad downloads video at a painful 30 kilobits per second, less than dial-up speed.

That means it takes several minutes for the video to display in streaming form, or to get copied to the downloader's hard drive.

Then there's the format problem. You might save your video in Apple's .mov format, which works fine if you have Apple's Quicktime program. Not all servers or video players support Quicktime formats, however.

MPEG is the "vanilla" video format — like ".txt" or ".jpeg" for text or photos — but the new MPEG 4 format, which offers a bigger and better image, isn't yet widely supported by ISP servers.
 
If you want to post multiple videos on the Web the way you'd post anything else, you have to pay for the privilege. The cheapest hosting service I found costs nearly $1,200 a year, a figure that tests the budget of many amateurs and casual Web users.

True, bandwidth requirements for video can be substantial, especially for a popular site.

So the ISP premium can be expected, even if it seems out of proportion with the rest of Web content.

Still, the video industry could find ways to promote Web video and reduce cost, as it has with other forms of publishing.

To showcase their products, camcorder makers could toss in Web space, for instance, as could software vendors. Even Apple, for all the popularity of iMovie, does little to encourage video posting via its .mac service.

It may be that the elephant in the doorway — Hollywood — is helping to discourage video on the Web because of privacy concerns. But movie downloads are spreading irrespective of industry threats.

As with music, it would make more sense for the entertainment sector to figure out a strategy to capitalize on, rather than discourage, digital video sharing.

Video has boundless potential that so far has met more obstacles than facilitators.

Paul Andrews is a freelance technology writer and co-author of "Gates." He can be reached at pandrews@seattletimes.com.