The Future of Online Video Will be Driven by Translation

Comments 13 January 2009

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Today’s YouTube panel discussion, Broadcasting the World: The New Ecosystem for News Online, was part YouTube pitch and part insider chitchat on how the news industry looks at online video.

Ann Derry of NYT made some interesting comments. News organizations are putting videos on websites like YouTube because that’s where the audience for online video is. The audience for the newspaper websites is different from the audience for their online video channels. News organizations don’t mind sharing their video content for free because nobody knows how to monetize online video.

The moderator Chris Cillizza quipped that “some people will say that ALL journalism is not for profit”. Jim Brady of Washington Post said “we are technically not a non-profit” and I sensed a collective shiver run down the spines of the newspaper executives in the room.

I pointed out that a significant percentage of online videos being uploaded by international users and news organizations are in languages other than English. Unlike non-English blog posts, which are easier to search and translate, these videos are almost inaccessible to most English speakers. I asked if the panel considered such non-English online video content important, and if they had thought about how we will be able to discover and watch such videos. Clearly, nobody on the panel had thought much about it, and I got a “great question” comment, but not much of a response.

I think that the future of online video will be driven by translation. Part of the solution will come from crowd-sourced translation platforms like DotSub, and part of it will lie in machine translation of subtitles, as offered by YouTube.

As I have written before, it’s extremely difficult to curate user generated videos. Translation will be part of the solution to the problem of how to add context to online video.

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Gaurav Mishra

Gaurav Mishra - who has written 746 posts on Gauravonomics Blog on Social Media and Social Change.

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