The Video Singularity.

By Andrew Cross, Ph.D , with significant contributions and advice from Steve Bowie .

How far we have come.

For over 20 years, I’ve devoted my life to building computer-based video technology products. What has always driven me was the mission to democratize the creation of content and allow anyone with a story to tell it using video.

As I began my career in software engineering, the video industry was dominated by a handful of powerful companies providing complex, massively custom hardware products – the so-called ‘big iron’ needed to solve the engineering challenges of major broadcasters. Building and operating a TV station cost many millions of dollars.

Two decades ago, computers were running Windows 3.1 and were considered far too unreliable for practical video applications. Needless to say, high-quality video was an elite domain beyond the reach of mere mortals. Broadcasting required big iron and big bucks; computers were for playing Pac-Man. The idea of using one for something as mission critical as a TV station was laughable.

Still, it was clear to me that there was never going to be a way to outrun the laws of economics. The ever-increasing performance promised by Moore’s law coupled with commoditization of computer systems guaranteed that general-purpose computers would break the big iron chokehold that had gripped broadcasting for over 50 years. Today, a walk around any TV station in the world reveals that virtually every system and process is running on a computer.

As revolutionary as this all was, however, it was just the beginning. Like a tropical storm transformed into a hurricane overnight, personal computers not only became much more affordable, performant, and ubiquitous – they were connected to one another and to virtually limitless audiences by high-speed networks spanning the globe, eliminating the need for huge, expensive antennae. The essential tools to create and disseminate high-quality video content were suddenly widely available, utterly shattering the longstanding, exclusionary broadcast model.

And yet – let’s be honest: Jaded by the breathtaking pace of innovation, the fact that our computers (or even our phones and watches) can create, transmit and display high-quality video with ease already seems unremarkable. Galaxies blur into light trails at warp speed; and in like manner, we quickly take this all for granted. By doing so, we fail to grasp the enormous impact of these events.

Over millions of years, our visual system evolved to serve as our primary mechanism of understanding the world around us, and of infinitely-nuanced communication with others of our species. Almost everything we know about the world results from our ability to observe, gather, communicate and learn visually. And, in modern times, this critical stimulus increasingly includes large quantities of video. Unless you want to wait another million years to evolve telepathy, video constitutes a singularity for communication. As an effective medium for human communication, there is no foreseeable “next step” after video.

It took nearly 500 years for printed material to become the primary mechanism for sharing information between us humans, but the pages turn much faster now. Full-motion imagery is quickly overwhelming the printed page, convincingly offering a more effective way to convey messaging. As we build increasingly more accessible and competent video tools, it is inevitable that virtually everyone with a story to tell will use video. At some point every web site, every restaurant, every school, lawyer, accountant, fitness club, charity, really every domain of human endeavor will do so (in fact, for practical purposes that time may already be here).

As 2022 draws to a close, some 7.26 billion people own a smart phone with a CPU fast enough to make video, and the 8 billionth human is about to be born. This means that, as video tools and skills proliferate, 91% of the humankind will have the capability of producing video content. (How many people have a smart phone in the world.)

We are just at the start of a journey that has changed and will continue to change the way we all work together, entertain ourselves, learn and share experiences with our friends and families. Two decades in, I still believe that this mission – giving anyone the ability to tell their story using video – represents one of the most meaningful personal opportunities to change the world.?

The open road ahead.

Given the irreversible trend towards the democratization of video content creation and distribution, one could be forgiven for expecting the influence of traditional broadcasters to diminish. After all, if anyone with an idea can author and distribute content with high production values, surely, we will arrive at a world in which what we watch is determined – not by who can buy the biggest antenna – but rather who tells the best story … right? And there is plenty of precedent; this story had played out over and over throughout human history.

Newspaper and magazine publishers were once the gatekeepers of the printed world and reading public; but the dominance of print media giants waned to an echo of former glory as printing and printers proliferated, allowing everyone from the stamp club to Neighborhood Watch and the PTA to publish newsletters, pamphlets, and posters. And then the internet drove a stake through the heart of hardcopy, making it possible to publish the written word almost without impediment – or filter.

Today, anyone can easily create their own blog; young children freely publish to web sites and social media. Even those who still write books find that the former gatekeepers no longer hold sway. Rather than sending manuscripts to publishers and waiting with fingers-crossed to see if your golden prose was deemed worthy, you can just go online and self-publish.

Things are no different in the music industry. Two decades ago, I’d have had to book time in a recording studio if my aspiring band dreamed of commanding the record industry’s fickle attention. Now my iPad provides audio tools that vastly outshine the traditional ones. And, if I wish (perish the thought), I can both publish and promote my own music with ease through any number of popular web sites and services, all without ever supplicating a producer for a record contract.

With this as background, predicting the demise of the traditional broadcasters as the broadcast gatekeepers was surely a safe bet. And yet – almost all the content that I watch today still originates with networks that look very similar to those of two decades ago.

True, the manner and time of our viewing has likely changed. We no longer surround the TV at our show’s scheduled airtime, or worriedly entrust our hope of finding out who shot J.R. to a fragile polyester ribbon spooling through a VCR. Instead, we likely watch our show on demand via the internet, perhaps on a portable device. Being honest, though, the content we watch has not changed all that much: The Super Bowl, World Cup and evening news remain the most viewed events on television after all of this time. Whatever happened to the video revolution that would liberate the masses?

To understand, it is illustrative to compare how the word processor changed the world of written text. Perusing the book section of any online bookstore (or the shrinking number of periodicals), one can successfully argue that modernizing text authoring tools had limited effect on the fundamentals of the written word. However, the development of word processing played a key role in enabling new ways of communicating that are far more disruptive. The most transformative technology of this century – the internet – is, at the core, a huge set of interlinked written articles, bursting forth courtesy of that same revolution in text authoring tools. Yet the internet is not a better book or a book replacement. It’s so much more than that!

For better or worse, the internet is where we find our media these days. And social media allows us to connect, collaborate, quibble, praise or rant, largely freed from physical constraints and boundaries. Some of the largest companies in the world today were built on this infrastructure and leverage it to let us publish our own news and views online. Those companies which literally controlled the world in former times, influencing elections, minting celebrities, advocating a new generation of politicians and sensational news (real and fake) – companies of seemingly unlimited influence – are being replaced by ones that are based on video, which humans have evolved to find intrinsically more effective. Even the Facebooks of today are being replaced with the TikToks of tomorrow.

As the warp speed light trails of innovation outside our viewport lull us to sleep, the pace of innovation may not seem transformative. Yet, just in the past year (while we were worrying about the state of the world) there has been another quiet lightning strike likely to change the world beyond anything we currently imagine. In a matter of months, generative AI tools have reached a point where almost anyone can simply prod a computer with an idea, and in return it will generate fascinating original images to represent our concept. As this technology rapidly emerges into the mainstream and gains momentum and still more power, it will exponentially expand our ability to express ourselves in ever-more impactful ways.?Content creation will become a solved problem, allowing us to focus on our ideas and stories.

The video revolution has not failed – we are just getting started.