There are many compelling reasons. These are only the latest. From emarketer.com:
Broadband users spend almost half their spare time in a typical weekday online, according to Media-Screen’s “Netpop|Play” report.
Google is striving to make all of the internet as valuable as text, and in a realtime format. This will level the playing field of content search in a revolutionary way. Video, audio, doc files, all of their value increases as their hit values rise. An illustrated guide.
As new media guru, consultant and professor Jeff Jarvis says:
This promotes other media to the exalted rank of text … This is the mark of true agnosticism coming to media: You should be using whatever media best communicates information in the form the user wants.
[...]
(O)ne can use different media strung together to tell a story: text, then an embedded video, then an original video, with links all about. It’s not having text here and video over there and audio up there. It’s about using all the tools appropriately at all times.
Using the talents of these departments of UAB to tell the University’s compelling stories, we’ll be ahead of the curve in reaching out to all of our audiences.
