Why Generation V?

A lot of people ask why I talk about the Video Generation now. After all video has been around for a long time -  even someone as old as me grew up with VHS (and Betamax of course).

But video in 2015 is very different from video in 1985. It's everywhere in our lives rather than a just clunky machine that sat under the TV in the living room. It's Petabytes or Zetabytes or whatever of content rather than BBC1 or BBC2. It's an excellent camera on the cheapest phone rather than a professional instrument which, when I started working in TV, cost as much as a small family house. But most of all it's a primary communication medium for a whole generation. Video didn't really kill the radio star, but it did overtake text and still images as a way of assimilating and sharing information, as a means of expression and as a medium for discovery.

A lot of us find this transition difficult to believe. In many ways video is a pain to use. It is relentlessly linear -- you can't scan it, for example, nearly as quickly as you can a page of print and pictures. It can take time to load. It can be slowed down with ads. And it is slower in general -- speaking speed is about 3 words per second, reading speeds can easily be 3 times that. We all know that as we've had to sit through those presentations where the moron reads Powerpoint word for word.

But none of this matters to Generation V. Video moves. It is nearly as real as being there. Who wants to read about it when you can see it happening? And Generation V is international as I was reminded a few weeks ago in East Africa. My iPad was repeatedly commandeered by younger folk in the village. Getting hands on a tablet is good enough but mine had a 3G connection that's even better. My 3G came via a local SIM-card and a pretty expensive pay-as-you-go tariff. I explained to the kids that their internet access would last longer if they avoided heavy bandwidth video and stuck to Facebook and other low-bandwidth stuff.

I explained and I explained...but the credit just kept being eaten by YouTube. These weren't unsophisticated kids -- they may not have their own smartphones or tablets but their fascination about gadgetry is such that they have begged and borrowed enough to know all the ins and outs of using tech. No the issue was that they simply could not stop themselves clicking on a video link even though they knew that would end their internet session quicker. Watching a short video clip was more valuable to them than a longer session looking at "static" football results or playing on Facebook. Video was the gold standard. The kids may have come from a village on the edge of East Africa, but they were full members of Generation V.