Why Video Isn't My Publishing Preference

I spend a lot of time writing. As you can see from this site and my output elsewhere on the web, text is my primary medium. While I believe video is a fantastic medium for entertainment and illustrating visual concepts, it’s not my format of choice. This post aims to explain the practical and philosophical reasons behind that choice.

I’ll note that when I refer to video in this post, I’m generally referring to structured and formed video – the equivalent to any of my long-form writings.

Difficult to Maintain and Revise

My long-form content on this site is constantly revised, edited, and tweaked. By design, dates of revision are displayed just as prominently as dates of publication. Text is easy to revise, edit, tweak, and reform as often as required. Video is much more difficult. One cannot simply edit a part of a video but must re-export the whole.

Platforms such as YouTube don’t let regular users upload a revised version of a video in place of the original; it must be a completely new upload which does not carry over the likes, dislikes, view count, comments, or ID of the original, and there is no way to setup a redirect other than placing a link in the pinned comment and description.

This dooms all content not perfectly planned around the inability to revise decidedly ephemeral. I lament the number of times I have found myself on video guides that are long since obsolete but that cannot be updated to reflect recent changes or developments.

Text has a permanence and resilience I simply don’t find in video and is significantly easier to back-up and archive.

Practical and Technical Hurdles

Video is huge – at least in comparison to text. Large sizes aren’t just harder and more costly to store and manage but also make videos more difficult and costly to host and share. For someone such as myself on a budget, it wouldn’t be feasible for me to publish video with reasonable loading times without the use of an existing host such as YouTube or Vimeo. It also acts to create a higher barrier to entry.

Video is more difficult to search/skim through and reference. I can search for a phrase on this site on a search engine (or via my full-text site search) and get results without issue. Video can be searched if a transcript or captions are produced, but these are often not presented to search engines. You also can’t search the visuals of a video unless they are meticulously described or alt-text’d. That is an extreme amount of effort, though, and is still a lesser experience.

Once I’ve gotten to a page I want, I can scroll through it and jump around swiftly to find what I’m looking for. Videos, on the other hand, must be scrubbed through section by section and then watched briefly to orient oneself and decide if this information is relevant.

From the consumer side, you generally need a more capable device to watch video; it consumes significant battery life and data. You need a way to hear the audio for the full experience and a suitable place to watch it without disturbing others or having your experience lessened by environmental factors.

Writing, by contrast, is fantastically accessible and durable – points I’ve already tackled in my post about Why I Write.

Videos are also more difficult to produce. Writing is just writing, perhaps supplemented with additional content to illustrate selected points. Videos require writing, as well as visual content and accompanying audio. In addition to this comes the requirement of a capable computer to edit video, the need for a quality camera and microphones, and significantly more time and effort to produce.

Video is also much more difficult to produce on the fly. So much of the writing on this site has started as notes on my phone at odd hours of the night or at inopportune times. The first draft of Open-Source Is Just That was written halfway up a mountain as it began to snow in New Zealand. It simply wouldn’t be possible to knock out a full video in such circumstances, which matters given how much of my writing spills out in fleeting moments.

Personal Elements

I’m not a terrible public speaker, and I’m not a stranger to presenting on video, but it simply isn’t where I’m most comfortable. I’m most confident with my hands on a keyboard spewing out words. I become completely fatigued when I spend hours editing content and hearing/watching myself to the point I can’t step back and assess my work objectively, even after a break.

I also feel less in control when producing video. The creative process of writing or designing things is entirely in my hands; with video, there is a lot more at play. Recordings can fail, events can be miscaptured with no chance for reproduction, presentation or readings can be flubbed necessitating multiple recordings, and so on and so forth. There are so many variables at play that it feels like a less reliable and controllable medium.

The final thing I’ll mention is that video as a process has many steps, and it isn’t until each step is completed, or at least decently far into production, that you can start to see the entire project, by which point it is difficult to course adjust. I like quick and immediate feedback; long turnaround times demotivate me.

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My preference for text over video boils down to a combination of practical realities and personal inclinations. The challenges of revising and archiving video, coupled with higher technical demands and lower accessibility compared to writing, make it inferior for my needs as I view them.

Most importantly, writing is where I feel most in control and most capable of expressing my thoughts as they develop, with the chance for quick ideation. Text is and will remain the primary medium through which I build and share my work, though that isn’t to say you shouldn’t expect some video content out of me.