Few media are as ephemeral as online video. You’ve experienced this if you’ve ever bookmarked a video and it wasn’t there when you checked on it later.
My short-lived video blog, One Stop Video, provides a good case study of the impermanent nature of online videos. I started the blog in March 2009 to spotlight and save some of my favorite funny videos online in one place. I officially quit the blog a year later after many of the videos I had posted had become unavailable.
Based on my recent count, 218 videos that I had embedded on One Stop Video in that year are no longer available. That’s the vast majority of videos I had posted.
I posted a few more items after that and stopped for good in October 2013. This extended period now includes 27 embedded videos that no longer play.
One Stop Video is now an empty husk of a website.
Some of those videos likely are still available somewhere else but were moved during a change in content management systems or licensing deals. I would guess that videos by The Onion and Saturday Night Live in this category.
But others disappeared when their websites folded (Atom.com, Break.com, Current.com, Spike.com, etc.) or their associated television shows were canceled (“The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien,” “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” etc.).
Other videos were taken down because of perceived copyright infringements.
I find this transient nature of the internet frustrating. But in a world where copies of most videos are only a Google search away, most people probably don’t mind.
Photo: “Broken Television” by Aidan Morgan via Creative Commons.
No comments:
Post a Comment