The quantity of videos online represents 40,000 years of viewing, Cayla says.
Question: How is technology changing the media?
Philippe Cayla: Everybody can get some news from the Internet. I read somewhere that in 2006, the quantity of videos which has been put on the Net represents 40,000 years of viewing. So you can imagine nobody can watch so much. So which means that the politics today is not so much to retrieve videos – to retrieve images – but to select, to filter, to check images. And which means that the work is more to be sure where the news comes from, where the images come from, where the …. So some have been trapped already. I don’t know if you know that some channels have been trapped by some images of … supposed to represent hunting in Iraq. And it was both caused by some … in Europe. I don’t know in the U.S., but Europe …. And after checking, it appears that it was a hunting in Scotland, not only in Iraq. And it was a fake made by a Scottish …. So it means … of course, there is a lot of work to check. We don’t need to send out so many journalists on the field, because there is always somebody on the field who had a few who is already there. And he makes it. He takes a picture. Everybody has a good camera now. And he puts his video on the Net, so his image is out there. What does it mean? What does it represent? So that’s where the real work is, to check. And after that to offer to the customer, to the viewer, something which is checked. That’s … That seems ….
In terms of broadcasting, I think that the … of broadcasting, watching the TV channel, … will also lose interest because you have already … if you subscribe to digital package like cable, or digital cable, or digital satellite, you have 200, 300 channels. You can’t watch all these channels. Even the news channels are too many. So I think the future lies in video on demand and video alerts. I think if we subscribe to video alerts, and we send you a message on your mobile, alert, you will watch a video which will show you exactly what the breaking news is. I think there is much future in that. So check information and video alert on demand.
Recorded on: 7/2/07
