As Dave Pogue writes in the Technology section of The New York Times in his article, 'Aha! Video Straight to a Computer,' we stand on the precipice of being able to directly input literally hours of video straight into the PC. 
Speaking in the lexicon of, 'What Customers Want,' a book that I am reading right now about outcome-driven innovation, being able to finally "hire" a product to complete a "job" for which the needs of the target user (people who want to digitize, edit and index video libraries) are high and the current satisfaction level is very low is a big deal.
Why? Because once you remove the need to convert video from tape to digital as part of the upload process, you remove a significant "friction barrier" to the average user working with video content in the same way that they currently work with photo or audio content. And we know how that one has played out in terms of photo sharing networks, like Flickr and, of course, the whole revolution in digital music, so the user utility, entertainment value and application potential is real.
Naysayers might retort that most of today's camcorders support writing video content to an internal/removeable memory card, but that misses the point. Such cards inevitably limit clip sizes to very short duration, rendering the functionality akin to the dog that walks on its hindlegs: novel but clearly not what it was designed to do.
Pogue sums up the "AHA" moment, imagining what the folks at JVC, makers of the new Everio G Series camcorder, must have thought when they looked at how people are using camcorders today:
"Let us get this straight," the corporate entity said (I'm paraphrasing here). "People buy tapes to put into their camcorders. They fill up a tape, then rewind it and play it into a computer - which takes a whole hour per tape - so that they can edit it and burn a DVD. Or maybe they buy one of those camcorders that record directly onto miniature DVD's, which are very expensive, hold only 20 minutes of video and can't easily be edited on a computer."
The "Aha!" moment came when JVC looked at the iPod. Why, JVC wondered, are we still recording onto tapes and discs, if we can record directly onto a tiny little hard drive like the iPod's? The camcorder could hold hours and hours of video, and you'd never have to buy another tape or specialized blank DVD.
As the article goes on to cover, JVC has not completely connected the dots in terms of user interface, usability and workflow, but the trend lines are clear.
As to my, I have a very compelling application in mind that rides this wave, but that's a blog for another day! ;-)
