The problem does not lie with video - the problem is that video today is very linear. Even people who think they prefer text do not actually do so - they just prefer being in control of the reading speed and being able to immediately jump to the information they want.
Imagine video that behaved like a real person sitting opposite you. You type in google - "Where is Tibet", and a video immediately pops up with a person who says "Tibet is in China" and at the bottom of the video a bunch of relevant extra information popup, allowing you to jump up and down in the video. This would work a lot better.
Video has to become searchable, navigable, and you should be able to have an information context in any videos that you watch. Then the web will benefit by becoming video based.
So instead of a 17-byte string, you get some enormous video (not simply audio, but a video with pictures and everything) of someone telling you exactly the same thing that you could have read in a few seconds?
I agree that things like searchable video have their place, but it is not for stuff like that!
I kind of agree here - I much prefer the control over text, until the text gets massive. It's very easy to keep getting lost in one big page of text when trying to follow along a guide of something.
It's also pretty bad trying to follow guides when the text is full of pictures.
Google finance has a fantastic dynamic web application feature - it has a big graph of stock price for the stock you are looking at, and next to it a list of news items relevant to that company and its industry.
As you zoom and scroll the graph, the news items change to only show news for the time period you are looking at.
Imagine video that behaved like a real person sitting opposite you. You type in google - "Where is Tibet", and a video immediately pops up with a person who says "Tibet is in China" and at the bottom of the video a bunch of relevant extra information popup, allowing you to jump up and down in the video. This would work a lot better.
Video has to become searchable, navigable, and you should be able to have an information context in any videos that you watch. Then the web will benefit by becoming video based.