Embedded video is broken

1 May 2008, 3pm

The highlights of my first trip to Europe, at the age of nineteen, were as follows: getting mugged at knifepoint by a tweaking mass of dreadlocks in Amsterdam (followed by a delightfully sleepless, dehydrated night in a hostel built by Satan himself); hearing, with stunned disbelief, a person of Japanese heritage speak in a cockney accent; and sitting on a Tate Gallery bench staring at the paintings of Francis Bacon, whose work I spent all my late teens and early twenties pretending to understand (still don’t, twenty years on, but continue to enjoy the hell out of).

I was going to tell you about this magnificent South Bank Show on Bacon, made around the same time as that trip (the best bit is the lunch, but do watch all six parts), and now that I’ve done that (just there, a few words back) I realise it’s been, what, twenty seconds since I rattled on all high and mighty and finger-pointy about some user interface issue, so let us then consider for a moment that embedded video is broken.

To my mind the point of failure lies at offering only two options to the viewer: stay locked onto the web page, which, no matter the site, is like watching a dancing bear on a television being carried by a dancing bear, or go full-screen, which, given both the resolution thang and one’s god-given ability to perform more than one activity at a time, is rarely attractive.

I know it’s possible to sneak in the back door of some video sharing sites and download files to watch on a standalone player, but that’s no solution to the problem.

This happens several times a day: I find myself at Youtube or Vimeo or Brightcove or wherever, begin watching something interesting, and immediately start looking for a way to put that in a corner of my screen so I can continue working or doing, um, research, and cast my eyes back to it whenever interest demands I do so. This evidently can’t be done using any of the popular embedded video gear, so I end up resizing the browser window (which results in layout chaos) and opening up a fresh window to resume what I was doing before. This is lame, this is broken.

Please Mr Internets, make a standard embedded video solution that allows us to pop up an actual-size window in which to watch the dancing bears while we continue to save the world. Thanks in advance.

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