I got a Flip Ultra HD camcorder today – £119 from Amazon . It’s a High Definition camcorder that’s incredibly easy to use, and plugs straight into your Mac (or PC). It’s the same camera that Gary Vaynerchuk uses for his highly effective daily wine review video at Wine Library TV.

Flip Ultra HD

Buying the Flip has really brought it home to me just how easy it is these days to make high-quality recordings and share them with the world.

It’s also reminded me that there’s a difference between a high quality picture, and a high quality finished production! I think that’s where the professionals will still have an edge. There’s no doubt that presenting a video is a skill, and so is setting up the shots and doing the editing. That’s where I think newspaper video content has often fallen down: it’s not enough to just give a print journalist a camera and tell them to make a video.

Another skill is figuring out which content is well-suited to video, and which is not. You can skim the text of an article, but you can’t skim a video. A video requires a real commitment of time on the part of the user; I personally rarely watch online videos for just this reason. I think online publishers who carry video content would do well to also provide a written transcript to help people decide whether to watch the video, and to get the basic points if they haven’t got time to watch the whole thing.

So what’s the future of online video content for professional publishers? Hardware and software to make videos is now fairly simple, and will get simpler, so everyone can potentially join in. However, good quality video production is pretty time-intensive. You can write text articles far quicker than you can do high quality video. So maybe video will remain a niche on professional sites: a treat.