Caleb Booker

Right Tools For The Right Audience

I’ve always been a fan of the Miro project, ever since the early days when they called it “Democracy Player”. Originally just a neat way to directly share large videos without worrying about weird YouTube compression (or censorship!), it’s grown into a supercharged video viewing tool with dozens of features:

• Play almost anything
• Resume a video from where you left off, even if you just closed the file at some point
• Playlist organization, sorting, sub-folders, and optional auto-play
• Search your hard drive for media
• Move files around your hard drive, or onto other drives
• Video RSS, torrent capabilities, podcast subscribing, auto-downloading
• A great big “Miro Guide” to help you find channels to subscribe to
• Grab YouTube videos as well as dozens of other kinds of media
• Open Source, compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux, multiple languages, etc…

So it’s cool. No argument there. Good on the Participatory Culture Foundation. But…

Should you care? I’m not saying they’re not awesome, but from a business perspective is this something you should spend time and money on?

Let me answer that question with another question: how much does your audience care about having the video on their hard drive, and are they really concerned about high definition?

It stopped being about what technology was better a long time ago. Now it’s about the habits of your customers. By way of illustration:

An Argument Against
I went into Miro today for the first time in ages and brought up the channel listing. Right away I saw two channels that I subscribe to already on YouTube: TED Talks and The Onion.

Did I subscribe to them in Miro? No way. The problem is that I can’t link to Elizabeth Gilbert: A different way to think about genius or Sony Releases Stupid Piece Of Sh!t That Doesn’t F*cking Work in any way that’s easy for the casual surfer to follow, and there’s no way for me to embed them in-line either. So as a blogger, this is a fail.

The other thing is that I don’t really care about high definition with either of those channels. I care about speed. Play it now, let me watch it, and I’ll bookmark it if I think I’ll ever want to see it again. While I love these videos, don’t get me wrong, I want to commit the smallest amount of system resources possible to viewing them.

An Argument In Favor
Scrolling down the channel guide a bit though, something did catch my eye: game trailers! Anyone who has ever watched one knows that a low-res game trailer is useless. How are we supposed to get an impression of what the game is going to be like when all of the controls are blurry?

Plus, especially for eagerly anticipated titles, there’s just no way I’m not going to want to watch it again tomorrow. I must have watched that Final Fantasy XIII trailer a dozen times in crappy YouTube quality all the while wishing I had a high-def version.

The biggest argument in favor though? Instructional videos! These are things that not only have to be in high definition to avoid a fatal error, but also videos that people hoard, organize, and burn on disk to keep safe just in case they need them later.

So… Where Does That Leave Us?
I’m going to echo something I said yesterday about designing new user orientation experiences, but apply it to designing a video series: figure out what your customer is trying to accomplish by watching your video, and help them do it! That may mean YouTube, that may mean Miro, or that may mean both… but if you have a fixed amount of time and money, you’d better be sure before you even start.