Online Video Trends Shaping 2005
The year free video hosting arrived, Apple put video in your pocket and Adobe bought the company behind the format that would end up running it all.
Online video changed more in 2005 than in the previous several years combined. Here’s what’s driving that shift, based on what’s happened so far this year.
Free video hosting shows up for the first time
Google Video launched in beta in January, letting anyone upload video without paying for their own hosting bandwidth, a real financial barrier that had kept plenty of small businesses and individuals out of video entirely. In February, a small startup called YouTube was founded with a similar bet: that people wanted an easy place to upload and share video, and that the platform, not the individual site owner, should absorb the infrastructure cost. It’s still finding its footing this year, but the core idea, free hosting funded by the platform rather than the publisher, is clearly the shift that was missing before.
Podcasting gets Apple’s backing
Apple added native podcast support to iTunes with version 4.9, released in June, giving audio and video shows a built-in directory and subscription mechanism inside software already installed on millions of computers. The term “podcasting” itself had only been coined a little over a year earlier, but Apple’s move instantly gave the format a mainstream distribution channel it hadn’t had before, turning what had been a scrappy, RSS-and-enclosure hack into something any business could realistically use.
Video goes portable
Apple’s October release of a video-capable iPod, alongside a deal to sell television shows through the iTunes Store, meant that for the first time, video content wasn’t something people only watched sitting at a desktop computer. It’s early, and adoption of video-specific viewing habits on the device is still forming, but the signal is clear: video is no longer tethered to the browser window it was watched in for the past several years.
The format layer consolidates
Adobe announced its acquisition of Macromedia in April, a deal that will bring Flash, the format increasingly used to embed video directly in web pages without a separate media player, under one roof with Adobe’s broader design and publishing tools. Combined with the free hosting platforms emerging this year, which favor an embeddable, browser-native playback experience over launching a separate application, Flash looks increasingly likely to become the format that wins the fragmentation fight that dragged on through 2004.
What this adds up to
Each of these developments solves a different piece of the same underlying problem that limited online video for years: hosting was expensive, formats were fragmented and video was stuck behind a desktop browser. Free hosting removes the cost barrier. Flash’s rising dominance, backed now by Adobe, is quietly resolving the format fragmentation. And portable playback means video no longer has to compete only for desk-bound attention. None of these pieces were fully in place a year ago. By the end of 2005, most of them are.
