Online Video Trends Shaping 2004
A snapshot of where online video stood in 2004: broadband crossing the halfway mark, viral branded stunts and a format war nobody had won yet.
Online video is having a real moment in 2004, even without a dedicated platform to host or discover it. Here’s what’s driving that, based on what’s happened this year.
Broadband finally crosses the halfway mark
Pew Internet & American Life Project’s tracking through 2004 shows broadband access among U.S. home internet users passing the halfway point for the first time, overtaking dial-up as the more common connection type. That shift matters enormously for video specifically: a dial-up connection makes even a short clip a frustrating, multi-minute wait, while a broadband connection makes watching video a reasonable, low-friction choice. Every other trend below depends on this one.
Branded content proves it can go viral without television
Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken” site, launched in April, became one of the year’s clearest examples of a brand-built piece of content spreading almost entirely through email forwards and word of mouth rather than paid placement. It wasn’t a traditional commercial moved online. It was built specifically for the way people share things when nobody is forcing them to watch. Expect more brands to try to replicate this instinct, though few will nail the specific ingredient that made it work: it invited participation instead of just delivering a message.
Political campaigns discover online video as a real channel
MoveOn.org’s “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest, inviting the public to submit anti-Bush campaign ads for online circulation, drew tens of thousands of entries and significant press coverage this year, well beyond what the ads’ actual production budgets would suggest. Whatever one thinks of the politics, it demonstrated something marketers were watching closely: a video doesn’t need a broadcast ad budget to reach a large, engaged audience if it’s compelling enough for people to pass along themselves.
The format war is still unresolved
RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and QuickTime remain split roughly three ways among viewers, and no single format has emerged as the default. This keeps production costs higher than they need to be, since reaching a full audience still means encoding and testing across multiple formats rather than one. It’s a genuine drag on adoption, and there’s no clear sign yet of which format, if any, will eventually win out.
Flash starts creeping into video’s territory
Macromedia’s Flash platform, already the standard for interactive web animation, is increasingly being used to embed and play video directly inside a webpage without requiring a separate media player to launch. It’s still a secondary use case compared to dedicated video formats, but the appeal is obvious: no external application, no format confusion for the viewer, just a video that plays inline. Worth watching closely over the next year or two.
The throughline
None of these developments happened in isolation. Rising broadband access made video-watching practical for a majority of users for the first time, which gave brands and campaigns an actual audience worth building content for, which in turn is starting to pressure the platform and format layer to catch up. The infrastructure for a real, mainstream online video platform doesn’t exist yet. The demand for one clearly does.
