online videos

I love online videos, they're so cool. Except when I'm at home where the internet's ridiculously slow. Then they just become sooo not cool. They make you wait and wait and wait until you accidentally close firefox as you try to click the maximize button to enjoy the video, and when you finally find the page in the history, the video needs to be loaded again...

But... I dunno, even with fast internet, the online videos doesn't really stream well. I get bursts of download stuff, and then nothing for the next five minutes. So with the internet being so unreliable, is it okay if there's a "preload" button for each flash video? When I find a video I like, I open it in a new tab, start it up, then pause it, and then go on checking out other stuff until it's done loading. Do other people do that too? Well, I'm lazy. 4 actions are too much. why can't there be a html link with a GET entry to tell the flash to start loading the video? Then I'll be able to just ctrl- click on that link, and keep checking out the other cool videos, and go back to that when it's done loading.

I've been using veoh.com's veoh tv. It's pretty cool, it lets you preload the videos you wanna see, and you can put it in a playlist and watch all those videos together. GREAT IDEA! Well, now that you made internet videos into tv, why don't we go ALL the way? yes. Make the internet into a tv channel. uh huh. REVENGE OF THE COUCH POTATOES!

Here's how it'll work. First, go to the top blog aggregator.. whatever it is. Use RSS to figure out a schedule for the posts. Go download the text, and pipe it into your favorite text-to-speech software. Display the corresponding media according to how it was arranged in the post. There we go! blog-to-tv converter. Now, if someone has even more time on their hands, make the text-to-speech software also produce a video of someone saying it. Depending on the mood -- which you can find out by matching some keywords to the blog or the post. You can have your own news broadcast just by typing up an article, and uploading some pictures. On the client-side, we can make couch potatoes just like that. But if the content creator wants more control, there could be a css-like entry, except it will be for how to display the page in video.

Okay. But the magic of internet is that you can choose what you want to see. The HT in HTML is about how a web page connects to another. So, to make an tv service outta the internet, you can't do what tv does now with numbers as channels. Web content needs a different method of navigation. Opera had a feature that showed all the links in a webpage, but just listing them off would give too many links for it to be usable. Find all the important ones, or categorize the links according to their role in the webpage. Navigational links in the webpage should always be accessible. If a link shows up where the automated reader is reading, that should be easily accessible too. Search should be incorporated as well. It should allow you to easily search the key phrases in the text.

The internet is better than TV in every way possible. Media companies just need to figure out how to make it into a good consumer product. So GET OFF your lazy butts and make me a product, so we can go back to the good ol' days of sitting on the couch and being lazy butts!