From blog maverick: Think the Internet will replace TV ? Think again. The gist of this post is that TV will continue to be delivered like TV for a long time, because it will take a long time for there to be enough bandwidth to deliver TV to computers across the nation.

I wonder if any of the visionaries who have claimed otherwise have ever read a little study by Jacob Nielson about how people behave when they watch videos on the web?

“We’ve just begun research on the usability of online video and other multimedia elements on websites. While I’ll surely have many more guidelines later, for now the main guideline for producing website video is to keep it short. Typically, Web videos should be less than a minute long. (emphasis mine)

A related guideline is to avoid using video if the content doesn’t take advantage of the medium’s dynamic nature. This doesn’t mean incessant use of pans, zooms, and fades to add artificial movement. It does mean that it’s better to use video for things that move or otherwise work better on film than they would as a combination of photos and text.

Finally, recognize that Web users are easily distracted, and keep distracting elements out of the frame of your shots. If there’s a road sign in the video, for example, users will try to read it and will thus miss some of the main content.

Since the Web’s beginning, I’ve warned against repurposing. The initial problem was that companies simply put up advertising brochures as websites. Later, newspapers and other content sites failed to follow the guidelines for writing for the Web and used headlines that were optimized for print. Now, as technology evolves, we’re seeing the same phenomenon for yet another media type: you can’t recycle video and expect to create a good online user experience.

The Web is its own medium. We seem doomed to learn this lesson again and again.”