Whither online video?

I was complaining on Twitter recently about the trouble I've been having with video on the websites of Australia's two biggest newspaper publishers. On the Fairfax sites (including brisbanetimes.com.au and smh.com.au), videos auto-load after a short delay in which, if I can find the right place to click, I can switch them off. Videos on the News Ltd sites (news.com.au and its subsidiaires) give me the option to watch or not but they take an age to load (and I'm not a patient person, so I often abandon my attempts). Neither situation, I ventured in a Tweet, is ideal. One of my tweeps said video has no place on newspaper sites. I disagree. I think they should offer video -- and, inevitably, they will have to do so just to be able to compete -- but they should invest more not just on the content (which can be amateurish) but on getting the technology right. Then I remembered one provincial newspaper where I worked as a younger man, where the IT guy (as he would be called today) was a slacker who deliberately made maintaining the very basic computer system seem more difficult than it really was. Because nobody else on staff knew much about computers, he'd created a nice little earner for himself and his secret knowledge. Of course, nowadays there are many different technologies at play and different delivery platforms to consider, so the job is genuinely difficult. But the fact is, they've got to do it. If the product doesn't work to the expectations of the potential readers, they will go somewhere else. A technological failure could sink a masthead just as easily as an editorial error.