What Should I Watch Next?

What have TiVo, Tioti and TVGuide got in common with the video meme trackers just launched by Megite and Tailrank? Sure, they all add, reveal or exploit social connectivity around video content, but they do it for the same reason. They're all trying to help you answer this question: What should I watch next?

This, I think, is the really hard, valuable-to-solve problem in video right now. Note, first, what this isn't. It's not a search problem. For sure, plenty of people are asking Google where to find the Timberlake SNL skit. But you're looking for this clip because someone - a friend, blogger or journalist - has  already excited your interest. So you watch it. What do you watch next? One of the reasons that YouTube grew so fast is that it was much better at answering this question than anyone else. Even though Google Video belatedly added social features like rating, tagging and embedding, it failed to understand that none of these features actually touched the question of what you ought to be watching next. Google Video is still incredibly bad at answering this question. Go look. it's still acting like it's a search problem, when it isn't.

As Pete Cashmore notes,  however, YouTube's ranking system is pretty broken right now.  None of the ranking metrics - views, ratings, comments - are particularly good at helping you discover new content that you'll like. And, as YouTube's star has risen, it's become increasing susceptible to gaming, ranging from cheap and cheerful spambots inflating view figures to sophisticated, paid-for marketing tactics like those used to elevate the Rocky Balboa trailer to attention. I've spoken to plenty of people whose trust has been lost as a result and who think, rightly or wrongly, that these days, you just buy your way into YouTube's feature lists.

A rash of alternative video voting communities have sprung up over the last twelve months, of which, Digg Video, VideoSift, Flurl and StumbleUpon Video are perhaps the biggest and / or best known.  This type of site provides two advantages over YouTube's own ranking systems. First, it can aggregate videos across several sites. (An increasingly notional benefit, as the same video footage turns up on multiple sites). Second, it can potentially coalesce a more cohesive or homogenous community, at least at small scales. As long as you choose a community of like-minded individuals, it's quite likely they'll crowd-surface stuff that you'll like too. This is key and does at least get at the root of the problem here, which is that in order to answer your question 'What should I watch next?' at all well, the system has got to have some understanding of your taste, or at least an understanding of things that can be predictors for it. As the size of the voting community grows, of course, the likelihood that you'll agree with a simple majority decreases and as the importance of the site rises, so too does the risk of potentially distorting voting fraud.

This is one of the point's that Arrington makes about the new video memetrackers, which base their results on blog buzz; that they should be less susceptible to voting fraud. To some extent, this is right. It's harder to set up a fake blog than a fake user account, though only just. And the meme trackers mitigate the risk of fake blogs to the extent that they upweight more authoritative blogs, though at the cost of increased methodological opacity.

It's interesting to see some of the different approaches here and the results that they yield. Both Megite and Tailrank upweight for authority.  Neither Technorati, nor our own site, Viral Video Chart, do. There's a lot of James Brown on all four sites today, but the distribution is quite different. Here's the number of James Brown videos in the top twenty on each of the four sites for 27 December 2006, three days after the big man died.

1. Technorati - 10 videos / 20
2. Viral Video Chart - 8 videos / 20
3. Tailrank - 5 videos / 20
4. Megite - 3 videos / 20

My hunch is that James Brown is being linked to a lot and that the democratic, one link / one vote nature of the top two sites here captures this demotic buzz quite well. In fact, on 26/12/2006, 12 of the top 20 videos (and, as Jeff Jarvis notes, 7 of the top 10) on Viral Video Chart were  James Brown numbers. (Note also that  we compile our chart over the previous 24 hours, so that's hundreds of bloggers posting James Brown videos on  Christmas Day).

It's also interesting to compare the number of links that these sites are finding for the top James Brown clip. Here are the results.

1. Technorati - 143 links / 48 hours
2. Viral Video Chart - 82 links / 24 hours
3. Tailrank - 4 links / unknown time period
4. Megite - 3 links / unknown time period

This makes me suspect that Tailrank and Megite are covering significantly fewer blogs than Technorati and Viral Video Chart. Perhaps precisely because they are trying to cover the more authoritative ones. But then this does lead to the result that a link from just a handful of influential blogs is all that's needed to make their front page. Which of course feels much more like the good old days of editorial selection and much less like buzz-tracking.

More coverage on the launch of video verticals by Megite and Tailrank here, here, and here. Rex Dixon looks like he got the scoop on the Megite launch.

I haven't had much chance to think how the new services from Megite and Tailrank impact on what we're trying to do with the Viral Video Chart, but they do raise some obvious questions.

• Should we put embedded videos on our chart pages? The reader would have to navigate less but it's harder to get an overview of what the top videos are.
• Should we give more prominence to the conversation around the videos - e.g. should we publish excerpts from the linking blog posts next to the videos?
• Should we downweight the less authoritative blogs? This would have an immediate impact on our chart, downgrading many of the MySpace videos.
• What would be the best way to measure authority and weight blogs when ranking videos? Should we use inward links to measure influence like Technorati? Should we consider the reach of those blogs (which would, for instance, be closer to the way in which radio airplay is calculated and weighted when compiling the Billboard Hot 100)? Should we consider the amount of videos that bloggers link to, or how successful those bloggers are at picking 'winners'?
• Most importantly of all, what can we do to help people who want to know what to watch next? Viral Video Chart can help a little at the moment, but really only a little. It will show you what the rest of the world, for better or worse is talking about right now / today / this week. But we don't make any attempt to find out what videos you've already seen. Nor to ascertain your taste.

The question of what I should watch next is primarily a question of taste. But none of the video memetrackers, us included, are tackling the taste issue head-on. It's implicit, perhaps, but only to the extent that there's a lazy, snooty and possibly incorrect assumption that the people who blog (or blog 'authoritatitavely') share my taste (in videos) more than the people who don't.

Comments

[matthew]

>Here's the number of James Brown videos in >the top twenty on each of the four sites >for 27 December 2006, three days after the >big man died.
>
> 1. Technorati - 10 videos / 20
> 2. Viral Video Chart - 8 videos / 20
> 3. Tailrank - 5 videos / 20
> 4. Megite - 3 videos / 20

Megite picks the top ones in the last 24 hours. So in this sense, Megite does better because of fewer videos.

Another point is that: should we cluster the related videos?

[Chris Brogan...]

I'll say I'm biased because I'm about to mention my own gig, but what we feel at Network2 is that your question, "What should I watch next?" is central to the problem with "single serving video."

Viral stuff is always cool, always explosive, and charts well insofar as how it reaches X numbers of people. We LOVE knowing that number.

But at Network2, we show you categories of Internet TV shows, shows that build a relationship through episodic content. We're interested in people who produce something you can sit down and watch 19 episodes of, and then, if you've hit the last one, there's something in the same category that might also appeal.

I'd love to know your thoughts on this as an alternative or different stream than viral-only viewing. You have to start with the understanding that it's not meant to replace viral stuff. Instead, Network2 is a guide to episodic and meaningful content, an "entree" versus straight up dessert.

ANyhow, great post and a wonderful question.

--Chris Brogan...

[scottjamesbutton]

I like what you're doing at Network2 a lot. And I think it's important to provide environments that enable viewers to build relationships with, say, Ze Frank, Rocketboom, or Diggnation that are akin to their relationship with a favourite TV show. Of course, they are TV shows, and we'll recognise the fact as soon as we can all have them piped to our TV sets.

How does it help to answer the question of what to view next? I certainly don't want to watch back-to-back episodes of any short-form internet show, at least not the ones I know, as they tend to lack the overarching narrative arc that would make the experience satisfying. But subscribing to 'shows' - I still want to call them shows: 'episodic content' forces too many neurons to fire - has the potential to queue up enough content in my feed reader / video player that the question rears its head less often, or perhaps, more precisely, appear to answer itself.

There's a bit of me that thinks it's the channels and networks that need episodic content more than viewers. Persistent viewer relationships with episodic content to which I have an exclusive right and which I drip feed daily / weekly to an audience = predictable ad revenues. So I'm interested as to how the fact that you as Network2 generally don't have exclusive rights to the content will imapact your business model.

[Snowman Killing]

I think you should watch this funny video of two country guys killing snowmen!

[Lindsay]

I think the list you guys compile is really great. You make it really easy for people to search for good videos. However, I found that most of the videos on your list come from youtube or myspace. It is possible of course that on that particular week the top videos come from there, but I would like to see more video sites counted in the rankings.
Please check out www.gotuit.com for some good videos as well.

[ggu]

watch this

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v15381802wnHQChN?searchId=5442444896772858058&rank=7

this is the most searched thing on wiki. just dont cry coz its emotional