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She was waiting for a train and was day dreaming for a moment. That was when she noticed the pram, with her baby inside, was slowly rolling towards the edge of the platform. It’s a moment of sheer horror. She lurches forward, but can’t reach the pram as it topples over the edge onto the tracks below. A moment later the train arrives; crunching into the pram and breaking it into pieces.
It happened in Australia two weeks ago. But because the incident was captured on CCTV and the video posted on YouTube; millions of people around the World have already watched the drama unfold.
The story has a happy ending by the way; the baby was miraculously unharmed!
Baby In Pram Hit By Train Video
It’s the latest example of the power of online video and how quickly information spreads virally in the digital age. If you search on YouTube for “baby in pram hit by train” you’ll find the same CCTV footage uploaded by scores of different people; some of the videos have had more than a million views each.
The pram drama came in the same week as some interesting new statistics. Comsocre, the digital research agency, says the number of online videos viewed every day now exceeds the number of daily searches on Google.
The research (which was carried out in the US) shows that in August 2009 10 billion videos were watched on YouTube. During the same month, Americans conducted only 9 billion searches on Google. There are no figures available for the UK, but generally where the Americans lead, we tend to follow.
And there’s been another interesting development in the world of digital media; Google has launched something called “promoted videos”. Promoted videos are Google’s answer to TV advertising. Now businesses can buy a video advert on Google (if they have a video of their products and services) in the same way they can buy TV advertising slots.
Even in the UK, it seems as if traditional TV and online video are now equally popular; I was fascinated last night to watch my two boys in the living room. The TV was on, but they weren’t watching it. Instead they were watching YouTube videos on their laptop.
The digital landscape is evolving at a tremendous rate and it’s hard to know what lessons we should be learning. However, thanks to the spread of online video, there’s one important lesson that’s being widely circulated at the moment: When you take a pram onto a station platform; make sure the brake’s on!
Graham Majin is Head of Video Marketing at Kent digital media agency Kersh Media and KWIKVID
