Online video. Thank goodness we’ve got so much of it to watch. Videos are everywhere today. So much so that in many cases site publishers are pushing video over regular text pages. For consumers, this makes it more difficult to get information; I mean good information, quickly. Most videos are really not worth the wait. For example, the network news and TV sites are slow to load. They require users to suffer through boring pre-roll commercials, which are usually not produced to be pre-roll at all. Many are just cut downs of :30 TV spots which in many cases fail to deliver the goods. And if you pursue more than one video on a site’s page, you are very likely to see the same pre-roll ad. Oh boy! And the videos themselves are just underwhelming. Boring or uninspiring content isn’t any better in a video than in text. It’s worse because you had to wait for it. The copywriters who develop clever headlines describing the videos are continually over-promising. When given the choice, I’d much rather consume content in text format than through a video clip pulled from broadcast. For others like me, the use of online video is really becoming more like the use of regular television. When I want to sit back and be entertained, I embrace online video on sites like YouTube. When I’m leading forward looking for information, I skip videos entirely. What used to differentiate the television experience (entertainment) from the online experience (information) years ago is now segmenting online behavior in similar ways. We’re being trained to avoid online video because it just ain’t that good.