| There are some cool elements to this system - the algorithm for determining what content to create and the ambition of the founder but overall the system seems to be designed to produce the video equivalent of sludge. Incentives are structured so that quality, in-depth content will be penalised while terrible, quick to produce movies will be rewarded highly. The only check on the terrible videos is the fact checking process but if you think you're going to get any kind of quality fact checking for a dollar then I have a bridge to sell you. Given the rewards are much higher for the latter kind of video, these videos are going to grow to dominate the service. The producers of these will make videos about anything they can, not anything that corresponds to their field of expertise so essentially all you'll be getting (at best) is educated guesses about your topic of choice. In fact there's probably a nonzero amount of money to be made in creating an automatic video generator which automatically composits videos and submits them under various names; remembering, of course; that it doesn't have to have actual information, it just needs to be good enough to get past the dollar per video filter. The internet doesn't suffer from a shortage of information (we're already drowning in it); it suffers a shortage of quality. I can't see this doing anything to solve that. That said, perhaps there's a market for sludge. If people want a few factoids about 'the best vodka' or something else that's utterly irrelevant, well maybe this will satisfy that demand. At least it's doing it cheaply. Finally on an unrelated note this seems to be video for videos sake. Unless there's something being conveyed in the video that can't be done easily in text (for example recordings of the Dean Kamen robotic arm) I'd much rather stick to text - it's faster to consume, easier to parse and much more in depth. |