Tardigrade videos on our website - permanent frustration guaranteed?
From time to time we do look at our user statistics. Well, the figures are still not quite at par with those of famous internet influencers like e.g. iJustine or Casey Neistat ;-)
but besides a general tendency is becoming apparent: text is much less attractive than images and
images are clearly less attractive than videos.
As we do have tons of tardigrade video material one should think that we were on the winners'
side due to this development? Yes - and no.
Let's try a short flashback: according to the Wikipedia the World Wide Web
started in 1991. It took some time until everybody understood those strange "www"-terms
in the public media and the tv commercials. And in the very beginning the Web was mostly
a text-only experience. Images took their time to display and video was a kind
of masochistic adventure.
The first ultra-short, almost ridiculously short and tiny video on our website
appeared ca. 10 years later, in the beginning of the 21st century.
At this time we had a quite dominant internet browser called Netscape,
almost forgotten today. The first Microsoft "Internet Explorer" followed a little bit later,
thus forming a "binary" video syntax world: videos could be either Netscape or
Explorer friendly. Of course our website syntax was adapted to this dual browser world
by providing a dedicated html video syntax, individually taking care of Netscape and the Explorer - ignoring and
thus neglecting other systems and future developments. Furthermore there were
only very few video clip formats existing, with *.avi dominating. But how on earth should
one predict or prepare for the technical developments of the years to come?
Well, we all know what followed: the Firefox browser, Safari, Opera, Chrome and tons
of new video compression formats like e g. MPEG-4. As a consequence we were constantly
struggling to adjust our website code to the new developments. In parallel we
received lots of mails from our (friendly and patient) readers stating that
the video xx was not running properly on their system yy.
Though the videos in principle could still be found and watched by interested people, e.g. by
Richard Hammond who used one of them for his BBC "Invisible Worlds" production,
the situation was far from ideal. New hardware-driven developents complicated the situation:
many people began using smartphones, iPhones, Android systems, tablets, smartwatches
and so on. As a consequence about 2015 virtually none of our videos was usable on any system platform!
But now we are coming up with a solution: the following video clip should be
viewable on most system platforms, as well as our iconic
"Sweets" video.
So do not hesitate to show it to bus drivers, friends, police men etc., i.e.
everbody who must be convinced that tardigrades are actually existing!
Well, okay, if this very video still shouldn't run on your system do
not hesitate to tell us. Of course this would be bad news but we will
try to make the best out of it and work on readjustments. We are used to it.
But please don't expect quick solutions ...
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