NY Times Writer Thinks Video Window Is Postage Stamp Size

Why is it that so many writers doing a story about some aspect of the streaming media industry always want to portray our technology as one that has not evolved over all these years? The NYTimes.com has a story today entitled “Nothing to Watch on TV? Streaming Video Appeals to Niche Audiences” which brings good exposure to the value of streaming.

But in the very first sentence of the article it speaks to our technology as if it’s still 1998 by saying, “Buffering … buffering … buffering. Seeing these words blinking at the bottom of the postage-stamp-size screen…” I don’t disagree that there is buffering, that’s how streaming media works. But to say that the window of a video clip is the size of a postage stamp is just flat out inaccurate. The average window size of videos on the web today is 320×240 pixels. That’s more than 8x larger than a postage stamp. Has anyone seen any video over the past few years in a window as small as the postage stamp above? Absolutely not.

To some, it may seem like I am splitting hairs here, but to me, it’s an important distinction to make. We’ve worked hard as an industry for many years to get away from the misconceptions that people still talk about like the “Victoria’s Secret webcast” or “postage sized video” and it’s time these writers doing stories on our industry and technology get it right.