How The Web Will Look In The Future

It’s official, the web has radically changed. It’s focus has gone from text to video.

According to a recent report by Cisco Systems, in the next 5 years:

1. Annual global internet traffic will grow by 1,000 times.
2. Web traffic will be 80% video (it’s already much more than half).
3. To watch the quantity of new video added to the web each month will take the average viewer 5 million years.

You Are Here

Currently, the web is built around a text based architecture (HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language). Text is the glue that holds the web together and it’s the container in which everything is presented.

When you search for a video, you land on a page peppered with text (much of it designed to attract search engines). Video is an afterthought – something “inside” a webpage, rather than the main event.

It’s difficult to conceive of a more upside-down situation. People want video, but they get text instead.

Imagine a Main Street lined with shops. Each shop filled mostly with merchandise the customers don’t want. And the “good stuff” is buried in the back. Instead of putting the popular items in the shop window, the merchant forces each customer to guess what’s inside and navigate to the back of the store. Does this sound like a formula for success?

Many websites do just the same. They hide the video behind layers of images and Javascripts. This makes it difficult for a search engine to index. It also requires human intervention to play the video.

For the most part, finding video on the web involves a lot of reading. And watching video is a high-touch experience.

The Future

Is it reasonable to expect web surfers to wade through reams of text to get to video? How about a web designed specifically for video?

Our startup, MondoPlayer, bets that users will want an easier and more convenient web experience.

We envision a web where the browser, the search engine and the player are optimized so users have an easy and seamless way to find and watch video.Their web experience is tailored for video not text.

Users of the Video Web will watch video and occasionally enter text to search for new content. The experience is a bit like watching TV, where you select the next show while you’re watching the current one.

But the Video Web is much more powerful than TV. It combines the infinite possibility of the web, the power of a specially designed search engine and a browsing/playing experience where watching takes priority over reading.

Words will be used only to describe the user’s search terms. The system will do all the work. It will execute the search, unearth the video and play it in the player. It will bypass the text and graphics on webpages like they are potholes on a road.

On the Video Web you have the option to look at the webpage, but only if you want. Otherwise, it’s all video all the time.

The web is going through a huge transformation. Video is already the dominant form of content.

As technology for capturing video becomes more ubiquitous, the volume of video on the Internet will grow at a rate that overwhelms text. Future generations will have a difficult time remembering when video took a back seat to text.