Top 10 Video Trends in 2022

Video has cemented its dominance as today’s top media channel.

From websites, blogs, and email, to mobile apps, social networks, and even VR, video dominates our content habits. It is a vehicle for entertainment, education, marketing, sales, and communication in general.

Within the video industry, there are trends which shape its development, creating new patterns of video production, distribution, and consumption. Identifying these trends is crucial for using video in a business setting.

To this end, here are 10 video trends shaping the online video landscape in 2022.

1. Silent Video

Consumer habits change in unexpected ways over time, and the recent silent video trend is an excellent example of this. The fact is, most viewers tend to watch videos in the background while doing something else, as was so often the case with traditional TV. Now that video playback devices support video multitasking through the use of picture-in-picture or split-screen modes, viewers can watch videos on mute while texting, gaming, or browsing the web. Video producers are responding to this trend by adding closed captions and subtitles to videos, as well as by producing video content without an audio component.

2. Social Media Video

Social media platforms are becoming video-first experiences, reflecting a change in online content consumption habits. Video is perceived as being more informative and engaging than text, images, or audio. This has led social media providers to expand their video features by introducing support for different video formats, aspect ratios, and sizes. Social media video ads are also on the rise. Video ads tend to stand out less when placed against a backdrop of other video content, which is making them more subtle and harder to avoid.

3. Short Form Video

In an age of short attention spans, video creators are trying to keep their content as short as possible to better fit viewer preferences. This has led to the proliferation of so-called ephemeral content, short video clips that expire from your feed after a while. Thanks to TikTok. Instagram, and lately YouTube with its Shorts feature, short-form video content is now an indispensable part of our media consumption habits.

4. Looping Video

A small but notable change to how video content is presented, TikTok’s looping video feature hearkens back to the days of Web 2.0 and its fondness for GIFs. By enabling looping by default, TikTok has made it easier for video creators to accumulate views. Looping has also raised the overall effectiveness of short-form videos. A video that plays in quick succession a couple of times has a better chance of staying in the viewers memory, which is a huge boon for video marketing.

5. Video SEO

Search engines are working overtime to deliver quality search results to the billions of daily video search queries. This means that the competition for SERP placement is at an all-time high, which is driving demand for better video SEO. To recap, video SEO involves the tactical use of keywords in video file names, titles, descriptions, and tags. Video transcripts, subtitles, and closed captions offer additional opportunities for optimization on platforms that support them. Some video platforms, including YouTube, have introduced features such as titles for video segments, adding another layer of SEO.

6. OTT Video Advertising

Video providers such as Netflix, Hulu, or HBO Max are sometimes called over-the-top (OTT) services to differentiate them from traditional media channels such as TV. The difference between the two is that TV has fixed programming, whereas OTT providers leave it up to viewers to decide what and when to watch. Major OTT providers were thus far reluctant to introduce advertising into their ecosystem, but falling rates of profit have led some to consider adding ad support. And thanks to extensive user data mining, they have a lot to offer to potential advertising clients. This means that traditional TV commercials are set to make a return.

7. Live-Streaming

Live-streaming took a bit longer to take off as a media format, but we’ve finally reached a point where livestream content is an essential part of the modern media diet. In contrast to videos which are contracting in length, livestreams are escalating in terms of size, with multi-hour streams becoming the new norm. This allows video producers to add more features to their content, including sections for advertising, branded content, shout-outs to sponsors, etc.

8. Interactive Video

Interactive video is a new form of content that enables viewers to directly interact with the videos they’re watching. Video creators can add quizzes, polls, and reaction, to their videos to entice viewers to engage with the content. The most popular implementation of interactive video content are shoppable videos. They enable viewers to purchase items directly from the video they’re watching, usually via a drop-down menu linking to a product page where a purchase can be made with the tap of a finger. We can expect to see this concept further expanded in the coming years.

9. Sponsored Video

The amount of video in circulation today has made the space more competitive for content creators that earn a living by making videos. This has led video makers to search for new alternatives to ad-based monetization favored by platforms such as YouTube. One of the strategies they increasingly turn to is sponsored video content. The benefit of making sponsorship deals with brands is more stable income, which is leading more and more people to become professional content creators and influencers.

10. Instructional Video

One of the most sought-after commodities online is practical information. By and large, people use search engines to find solutions to practical problems, and video is more engaging and convenient as a tool for sharing information. This has led to the rise of the instructional video. Google tends to favor video results for instructional content, and demand is always on the rise. We are coming to a point where an entire school curriculum can be assembled from various online videos, a tendency which is democratizing education on a massive scale.

Conclusion

Video technology is improving at a record pace, accelerating existing trends and giving birth to new ones each year. If these 10 trends are anything to go by, video will become the dominant media format of the 21^st century, and everyone involved in content production should take not and prepare.