Today I received an email from Macromedia touting the website for Volvo's V50. It's a Flash video hybrid that demonstrates what money and technology can do these days.Firstly, let me just say there's more of this coming. My contacts in advertising have all recently been talking about "immersive full-video experiences" which they intend to implement with Flash. The idea is to ditch key elements of the text web interface (namely text and traditional forms), and create something that's a hyper-real blend of video and animation.
But that can easily be palmed off as advertising directors abusing the web. If you've spent much time stripping your work back to bare basics for the sake of standards compliance, you'd probably think so. However, you'd be missing the real insight here, which is that the development of broadband as a distinct space is finally starting to happen.
Most people in the industry still think of broadband as a class of connection, whether it be fast DSL through Cable to a T1. But in reality, broadband as a generic term will soon become disconnected from the technical specifics, and come to represent a particular kind of content. A space beyond the hypertext web that consumers refer to by name.
Allow me to paint a (somewhat inadequate) word picture:
"It's off-broadway, for TV."
In the same way that off-broadway plays are the poor/weird cousins of premium theater, some things are appropriate for regular TV broadcast, and some aren't. Whether it be short, cheaply made, or interactive, there's just a certain class of content that lends itself to being browsed on a computer rather than watched on TV. The point is that broadband is definitely not just text websites delivered faster, or even text websites with a few bells and whistles added. It's TV-on-demand, but also on-a-budget.
Of course, the first folks to realise this fact worked for TV stations. For the past several years, experimental services like ABC Australia's Fly TV have been posting short features and animation snippets for the sake of brand fortification and format development. It hasn't been a massive success, but undeniably kids have been growing up for several years now learning to think of "broadband" as stuff that either doesn't fit a regular TV schedule, or is too strong for primetime.
Let's imagine it another way. If you've flown in the past few years, internationally at least, you will have encountered in-flight entertainment systems and movies on demand. These types of systems are typical of what I'm describing except instead of full-length films, "broadband" (as a mental concept) will be associated with anything under 5 minutes or so. High budget productions might last longer, especially commercials like the Volvo V50 example, but on the whole it will be quick and easy to digest, and tied together with a kind of interface that we really haven't seen yet.
So what can you do to take advantage of the emerging broadband market? Start studying short features; DVD extras, cartoon shorts, interactive CD-ROMs. Figure out how to make disparate pieces of DV content fit together and interlink in ways text pages can't. Find yourself writing down scripts, counting words, and figuring out what TV and movie people have already learned about stringing pieces of video together.
Mostly though, pay attention not to what software companies and entrenched geeks think, but what teenagers and children are actually saying and doing. Young consumers are key, and what they're saying is... "that'll end up on broadband."
The wording says it all.