Video formats and concepts are having a huge and unexpected blooming through new media; till now, creators and owners were just moving their videos from original environments to the Internet, but now the evolution of new media forced to re-invent this way of communication to the new nature of the network. Video now is not an adaptation of our old betacam tapes, but is being reborn in another context, format, place, language and nature in its own right.

Structure of actual trends of video chart

Technical format
While production companies were arguing about DV, HDV or HD standards during the past few years, at another level the fight is much fiercer because there are not standards in video through the Internet (even in the Internet itself). Every platform took its format and just broadcast it. Now, the huge amount of contents is forcing the companies to make an effort to decide for a standard format that allows an easier distribution and exchange of contents. Youtube finally decided to abandon the 4:3 format and took the panoramic format. The standard H.264 is becoming the in-fact standard due to image quality and low bandwidth. Even some platforms like Vimeo are allowing their users to upload their videos in real HD (1280×720). Due to the quantity of distribution platforms and devices like iPhone, Google 1G, cellphones, PSP , etc, experts think that there are too many formats and the future challenge is to decide on a standard for distribution if we really want to give the industry a push.

Source
The unexpected blooming of video in Internet come from their source: users are the main creators of everything. Particular users uploaded tens of millions of videos to Youtube or equivalents, and years later the production companies realized the opportunities and created their own online channels through those platforms. But this romantic ‘power to the people’ it is not so; at least 60% of the contents that private users upload are old TV productions, videoclips, and other stuff that they never produced by their own. Anyway, we can find three big sources of contents in networks:

• Video contents created by users
• Contents by production companies adapted to the network (Youtube channels, live TV)
• Productions oriented for Internet distribution

The real challenge in the future is the third source mentioned. There is a new generation of contents generated for internet distribution such as series, movies, etc, that are now walking slowly. However, the consolidation of mobile and internet users as costumers will give the financial push needed.

Distribution
The distribution of video had the main impulse through Youtube and equivalents. After those times, now the contents disposal is being multiplied by others:

• 3G mobile networks
• Social networks
• Blogs, personal pages and information sites of corporations
• Broadcasting channels

Users sharing video in Tokyo

Copyright Law
Due to the facility of free traffic of contents in both ways, uploading and downloading, users may upload any copyrighted content and it is becoming a big problem for the industry. If the shared-content age comes with the free internet exchange of contents, now there is an intense public debate about copyright, copyleft, intellectual property and Creative Commons licenses. No one knows the final result, but new technologies are changing the nature of contents distribution and it will revolutionize the way we understand it.

Copyright Management
As the contents owners are facing the new nature of contents distribution, some of them are trying to adapt to the new emerging context. Myspace signed a contract with Auditude for a service that allows owners to place advertising in their videos broadcast in Myspace TV when any user uploads it without their consent. This is done through an invisible ‘thumbprint’ placed in the video which is detected automatically.

Language
As audiovisual media made its own language seen on commercial spots, and the TV created its own version of cinema movies (TV serials), we can not expect that video on networks be a simple adaptation of old formats. Now we are experiencing a newborn change in storytelling formats, length and even subjects of contents.

Interactivity
One contribution of the interactive media is obviously interactivity itself. We can find a few examples just considered as experiments, but we’ll have to wait to check wether interactive videos could become a new solid format. At least, this is a huge field of exploration for creativity.

Real time
Nowadays TV channels are broadcasting their contents via internet, but it isn’t new. The next real contributions are both:

• Ability of users to live broadcasting through platforms like Ustream
• The incoming trend for companies, brands and advisers to create their own live contents to show relevant information to their audience.

Conclusions
We still don’t know the final format that the network will give to video, but we can certainly know that the formats will have a new nature. And we are sure that the fast and special way of distribution, authorship, and technical capabilities will bring us something really awesome for human beauty and knowledge.

Times doesn’t seem to be different now. Google is the father of everything (if not the big brother) and Blackberry is getting drunk in every corner-bar going Dutch with his new friend iPhone.

But the real change doesn’t come from technology, neither from the networks;  the web and applications had to evolve from a broadcast message to a full collaborating environment. It’s the popular 2.0 and we don’t need to talk about any longer.

Think globally, act locally.
There are two big agents who use this historic expression summing up their daily work. The first one comes from the system itself; the second one comes from the opposite direction, the main system criticism.

Nestlé International was accused many times of being an extremely huge company to be able to respect local markets and small communities, bringing the only thinking of western way of life and capitalism methods to unprotected areas. However, Nestlé’s executives have always defended the corporation showing that at least 40% of the company’s revenues come from local brands, both produced and distributed over every country or community they work in. They said to work globally but every single step they take is local, that is their interpretation, in their own words, of the mantra ‘Think globally, act locally’.

On the other hand, the second agent to use hold belief is the anti-globalization community itself. The term was coined by the activist David Brower in 1969 referring ecologist roots. Years later, the anti-globalization movement extended the meaning of the same idea; we can not change the world if we don’t start the fight in every little community first.

A real change in today’s context
This historical account is just a nice point to start. Not too long ago, the information interchange in the internet was one-way: from brand to costumer.  Now, the fight is not in the mainland but in the little streets instead; users are interchanging information passing over the brands.

Anyway this is not the main issue.  The point is the result of these tools: everything is more local than ever:  social networks connect people who are near, no one wants to find transcontinental couples but persons in their own town in online dating services, people are leaving nicknames to take real names instead (see Facebook, Xing), the audience wants to show their real photo in profiles, 3G networks are concentrating applications involving local services, bloggers are putting maps of their physical locations in their posts, technology is helping the local political debate, and local events are taking power through the same social networks.

Not enough? We are missing the most important point, which has a wide future that we’ll meet soon: Local advertising is not only possible but really powerful as well, through services like Adwords, where advisers can segment messages geographically, and contact the right person in the right place they need.