Here is the transcript of an interview with DigiNovations’ Michael Kolowich, conducted by James Careless of DV (Digital Video) Magazine for the February 2010 issue.

Very, very close to 100% of the projects that we do today have at least one web video component.  It is by far the most dominant delivery destination we have.  Even when we’re doing TV spots or live events, there is almost always a web version that’s a little longer, more comprehensive, and tailored to web audiences.

We produce everything we do in full, 1920x1080p…even if its principal destination is for the web.  With the technology we now have in cameras and editing systems, there is little cost or performance difference between SD and HD, default to full HD and down-res for the web as needed.  Our principal camera format is XDCAM EX, which we shoot mostly at 30p.

Moving to progressive rather than interlaced video formats has dramatically improved the quality of our encoded material for the web.  We’ve been using Flash Video (with the ON2 codecs) principally, but have recently changed our mix more to H.264 for broader compatibility with mobile devices.

The web video we produce goes everywhere — from YouTube to Facebook on one end of the spectrum to Brightcove-based private internet TV channels integrated into company websites on the other end.

Every single one of our clients is using web video, almost without exception.  That’s not coincidence — we fan the flames quite a bit, encouraging them to think about web distribution for everything.  But more and more clients are coming to us with web video in mind right from the outset.

Web video is popular among clients, but for most of them, their understanding of the possibilities is not terribly sophisticated.  They’re looking for insight, advice, and help.  Many of them are marketing communications pros who’ve just been told, “Get us one of those viral videos on YouTube please.”  They need education about the difference between putting up a video and a smart video marketing program.

Until recently, the biggest challenge in web video was in the many steps required to prepare it, transcode it, upload it, and test it.  The settings in compression software were often obscure and difficult to comprehend.  Much of that has changed in the last year.  The latest versions of NLE’s have a raft of presets that handle the most common cases.  Services like Brightcove and YouTube employ server-side encoding software that will take just about anything you can upload and make it look halfway decent.  Note I said “halfway”, though.  There is still a lot of value to a video professional knowing the ins and outs of compression, because the settings you use for, say, a talking head are radically different from what you might use for a sporting event.  Knowing what kinds of material compresses well or poorly can also influence the choice of shooting style, transitions, and effects for material that’s destined primarily for the web.

In most business-to-business video marketing applications, a demand for HD web video per se has not yet developed.  That changes, though, as you get more into consumer markets like fashion or TV programming-on-demand.  The most common platforms we employ, though, make this a non-issue.  The majority of our videos go through Brightcove or YouTube, both of which offer a multi-encoding approach that prepares multiple renditions of each uploaded video (from HD to sub-SD resolutions), detects the viewer’s connection speed, and serves up the appropriate version based on the viewer’s available bandwidth.

Over the next year, we can expect to see more interactivity built into the video stream.  Clickable hot spots, synchronized web page events, sidebar video segments are all coming, which will extend the experience of web video viewing beyond the 16:9 frame and onto the web page that surrounds it.

At the same time, analytics will get a lot more interesting and valuable.  We’ll be able to tell even more about how groups of viewers react to a video segment, second by second, and relate those reactions to commercial calls to action, such as buying a good or signing up for a cause.

And finally, video for mobile devices will start to become more standardized, and therefore more consistently available as a messaging platform for video markers.

I believe these new capabilities will come to full flower just in time for the next presidential campaign, which will kick off just about a year from now.  (I headed the digital media team for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign last time around.)

It depends what you mean by the question.  If you mean will projects be developed that are purely web video, it’s already happening.  If you mean web video to the exclusion of all other media, I highly doubt it.  Even if DVD’s go the way of the VHS tape, we’ll be seeing new media that we never even imagined that will make interactive, high-definition web video seem downright primitive.