Yahoo Video Search
Yahoo launched a beta version of a new video search engine yesterday.
John Battelle commented today on the potential importance of Yahoo’s foray into video distribution:
Yahoo is using its power as a major distribution player to feed what it hopes will be a major play in video distribution. It may not seem like a big deal now, but as the web increasingly becomes a native environment for video, it will may well prove to be one of the most forward looking things the company has done this year.
I think this has some potential application for web evangelism, and I’d like to offer some initial thoughts.
I took a moment yesterday and today to search on some common Christian terms (christian, church, Jesus, God, etc.), just to see what would come up. I saw a few items which appeared to have a Christian theme (I did not follow the links to view the movies, though), but for the most part, there wasn’t much that seemed compelling. Part of that was because of the small amount of information about the videos which Yahoo provides in their search results. But they do show a thumbnail of each video which offers a small opportunity for the video publisher to make their video perhaps more compelling than others in the results.
When I searched on terms which I thought might be things today’s unbelievers might be entering (spirituality, meaning, loneliness), I didn’t find much of a Christian nature.
I was able to find a fair amount of Christian content when I searched on “testimony,” but then again, what unbeliever would be searching on that word?
In conjunction with the launch of this new service, Yahoo is also suggesting an optional set of metadata extensions called MediaRSS. Here is Yahoo’s description of these new extensions:
“Media RSS” is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilties of RSS 2.0. RSS enclosures are already being used to syndicate audio files and images. Media RSS extends enclosures to handle other media types, such as short films or TV, as well as provide additional metadata with the media. Media RSS enables content publishers and bloggers to syndicate multimedia content such as TV and video clips, movies, images, and audio.
This would allow video publishers (including churches which develop videos of the life stories of their members, carefully crafted to present the gospel in a tasteful, compelling manner) to have some level of control over when their videos appear in search results. Given the small amount of information (related to each video) which Yahoo is providing in the search results, I would think that being able to control the thumbnail image which appears (which is the function of one of these extensions) would allow video publishers to make their video more compelling and increase clickthrough rates, at least to some extent.
I believe that video search will become more and more important in the future, especially as broadband penetration increases. The church would do well to consider this opportunity and be prepared to offer compelling content which will intrigue unbelievers and “compel them to come in” to the community of believers to see what we’re about.
I believe that the internet provides today's church with a historic opportunity .... to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love in ways which could only have been imagined in times past. The objective of this website is to explore the various ways in which today's technology can be used to spread the gospel around the world.
