
Ask HN: What do you dislike about video on the web? - mintone
I’ve been working on building a video platform that’s a bit different - we’ve all sat through so much recorded and live video over the past months and there are many clear pain points - typically it’s not an accessible medium, has poor SEO value unless transcribed and when prerecorded is inherently one-way. My personal bugbear is that it’s also entirely unnecessary for many of the things it’s used for (what happened to phone calls?).<p>I’m working on a platform called Foyer (foyerlabs.com) with the aim of improving those issues and more, and would love to hear what HN likes and hates about (work-related, I’m not gunning for YouTube) video on the web.
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dalmo3
My main problem with non-entertainment, prerecorded video is how little
control you have on how you consume it, when compared to text. Consuming video
is too linear and opaque.

When you open a book, article or even forum thread you have immediate access
to all the content, can quickly skim through the index, chapters, headings,
posts and make a mind map of what's happening. You can adjust your reading
speed on a sentence basis. Jump back and fro, Reread a difficult passage 10
times effortlessly.

Video on the Web is basically no better in that area than VHS was. You get a
clickable timeline, timestamps and that's that?

Transcripts are a starting point, but a bit useless without a proper TOC. Now,
if you get that part right but the video is just someone talking, the video
itself becomes redundant (for me anyway, I know people are different.)

Visuals-wise, some platforms have a quasi-instant lowres preview when you move
the timeline cursor. A nice upgrade on that would be to show the transcript
and possibly section (drawing from the TOC idea above).

I can't think on how to greatly improve this, but you did ask what we
disliked.

