How Video Is Going to Take Over The World

Forrester Research lays out a future landscape dominated by video in a new report How Video Will Take Over The World.

Analyst James L. McQuivey, Ph.D, envisages consumers being confronted with “a dozen video platforms per day.”

He asks us to imagine:

1. waking up to a video alarm clock;
2. checking satellite weather videos on your mobile phone;
3. watching traffic videos on your GPS unit while driving in to work;
4. watching an ad for a Ford Edge (F) on Gas TV while fueling up at a gas station;
5. streaming MSNBC stock reports from your desktop at work;
6. seeing a short address from your CEO in a meeting-room photo frame;
7. watching a promo for American Gladiators in the back of a video-enabled taxi on the way to the airport;
8. hearing Glenn Beck’s take on the elections while waiting at the airport gate;
9. watching a clip from your daughter’s middle-school debut in Guys and Dolls that your spouse emailed as you board the plane;
10. indulging in American Idol on the satellite TV on your JetBlue (JBLU) flight;
11. checking in at your hotel through a video kiosk; and finally
12. catching Iron Man in HD on the hotel room’s flat-screen TV.

In five years, it will be a rare day in which you don’t experience this many different video platforms.

What McQuivey calls OmniVideo “is about to explode, driving up total video viewing time from 4 hours per day to 5 hours by 2013.”

“Once video becomes this easy to produce, deliver, store, and share, every agent in society will not only want to participate but will have to participate in order to have a shot at reaching people with its products and services.”

In his view that means:

• Consolidation and collaboration will increase even faster than before. But the pick-a-winner approach to integrating content with devices will get blown wide open as companies like Sony (SNE) and Panasonic realize they can’t bet on a single partner but have to offer access to all major content partners.
• Companies will continuously “broadcast” video from inside the enterprise. The Internet has forced marketers to go far beyond a few ads and some brochures in their communications efforts. The shift to video will be much more taxing because companies have to have a strategy for communicating every message — internal or external — with video.
• Every video surface will become a marketing platform. When nearly every surface in your environment can display video, marketers will pay a pretty penny to show up at the bottom of a food bowl or in a bathroom mirror, where their product marketing message will be far more relevant than it is on a TV today. “The only broker of this ad space in your home is you: We envision ad networks one day paying you for the right to aggregate your ad experiences.”