This may well turn out to be the wave of the future, and in any event content like this will always find some audience, but in this household we spent perhaps 4 hours watching online video this weekend, and none of it was simply rejigged TV content…. None of it was only 90 seconds long – in fact the documentary was 75 minutes long. Oh, and we watched exactly no TV.I think the transition of conventional TV production models and values to the online world is a good thing – it needs to happen if the evolutionary process that will produce what this new medium is capable of is to get started…. For the better part of a generation, TV has been producing content for an audience that has pretty much abandoned the will to live – or at least the will to think – and has operating on Pavlovian instincts alone, spending uninterrupted hours moving from remote control to refrigerator to sofa to bowl of chips…. Put another way, if TV is no longer capable of producing Maude, All in the Family, MASH and the Watergate Hearings – TV that changed the way we think about our world and moved us to action – it’s time to give a shot to some others who will.And content will come from everywhere.

And so far, nothing that any of the campaigners for U.S. President has done with online video suggests to me that this is seen as anything other than a channel for TV-type promotion.Sifry links to a column that he and Andrew Raseij penned at Politico on the topic, with some interesting observations from a campaign that is trying something different, across the pond:Picture this: Every day, a major candidate for the highest office in the land spends a few minutes talking into a video camera held by an aide…. On other days, he’s sitting in his office, giving candid responses to the top five questions that have been posted to his blog, as chosen by visitors to his site.The videos are all generally unscripted; the settings are unencumbered by props; and the camera work is about as good as any tourist’s visiting the zoo.If you think this is a fantasy, don’t…. His casual and extended videos have not hurt his popularity; right now, Cameron’s Conservatives are leading the ruling Labor Party by 13 percentage points in a recent poll.For all the talk of this being the “YouTube Election,” however, none of the current candidates for president of the United States is doing anything close to what Cameron is doing…. I was very impressed with the Obama site and hopeful that he would do something truly new with social media, and it still seems to me that he more than any other candidate has the latitude to take video in the direction that Sifry describes, but it hasn’t happened yet.