Digital Home Thoughts: Thinking About the Future of Video Distribution

"In my view the direct relationship is possible, though less likely, since it would imply that I can simply and easily find it all. How would this work? Would I subscribe to a feed with keywords (in iTunes, Google / Google Reader), browse a directory of interest (in iTunes or Yahoo) or would I search and click (Yahoo or Google)? Personally, to see it as a purely direct relationship means that people are interested in working to find what they want, rather than relying on a system that makes it easier through either editors or a user based folksonomy like a del.icio.us, which would still need to download and sync to your machine and portable devices."



I think Jonathan Greene is right on with this one. The systems that work are the ones that are the easiest for consumers to use (One of the reasons why people downloaded over 1 million videos via iTunes even though I doubt there were even tens of thousands of video iPods to play them on). They only major problem with keywords/tags are you need something to sort though them all . This means that the client needs to be as simple and easy to use as possible. I'm not sure if any client is polished enough at this point, but Microsoft needs to do something about WMP or it will fall behind.