Design

Digital video lacks the magic of analog. The power to fast-forward and rewind smoothly, or “scrub” play any speed and direction, is four-dimensional chess to digital video’s two dimensions.

Yes, formats like ProRes in non-linear-editors bring this back to digital video. But why not social media? Why can’t I smoothly scrub TikTok in any direction and speed?

One can’t argue that this is a necessary sacrifice of format compression. Because any client can download and linearly decode keyframes far enough ahead to scrub a meaty length of video. A social product manager could build this type of player.

The ability to toy with video like it’s on a DJ turntable just isn’t profitable user behavior. 

Collecting telemetry to effectively spy on users to serve them ads requires that users behold static video assets in a non-interventionist way. Allowing otherwise would add noise to the telemetry signal.

But what if noise is the signal? Maybe video-scrubbing outliers are an untapped, unmonetized majority

Chocolate rainmaker. Singer. Thinker. Voice