I totally get that Flash Video and sites like YouTube make it both easy and bandwidth-affordable for all kinds of sites to offer video content. In most cases, this isn’t a bad thing: the internet was meant to be a multimedia experience with text, images, sound and video. Plus, I waste a lot of time each and every day watching stupid videos off digg and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But as good as video content can be, sometimes it’s just tacky. Case it point: theweathernetwork.com.

I’ve been checking the Toronto weather all night because they’re predicting more snow tonight. So that red banner across the top was of interest. But while I was expecting to get linked to a news story or data table, instead I was brought to a video.

This is a patently ridiculous use of video online. If I wanted to watch a weather person tell me about the weather at length, I’d turn on the actual Weather Channel. When I visit their web site, I want the information presented to me all at once, so I can read it quickly. When it comes down to pure information delivery, text is faster than video nearly 100% of the time.

Video for the sake of video is a bad idea, and one that indicates that there are still powerful people out there who don’t really understand this whole internet thing yet. Here’s a protip: it’s not just a TV with a keyboard attached to it.

Tags: internet, video, weather, web 2.0