The Future of Screencasting / Screen Capture is Bright.

Here in the US, and Michigan in particular, the near term economic forecast is pretty gloomy, but I don’t think the same is true for the screen capture / screen recording (screencasting) industry. I was struck by this thought as I was reading how shark fans are tracking the location of a great white shark on the web after its recent electronic tagging by the Monteray Bay Aquarium. I know it seems the article is completely unrelated to screencasting, and it is, but it’s subject belies a much greater truth — consumable information (data) is growing exponentially and that is good for the screencasting industry.

Data growth in turn means more software applications will need to be created to process the data and still more applications built that consume and present that data. There’s an inherent cycle here — creation to consumption to creation that’s reached critical mass. The World Wide Web is the most well known example of such a data consuming and spawning system.

So how does screencasting fit into this picture you might ask? Human beings are the end consumers and interfaces between all of these systems and data. Human beings are the spark that spawns the data collection. Human beings build software to process, organize and present the data. Ultimately, human beings consume the data and renew the data life cycle. All of this implies a fertile food chain of people who must communicate with each other about highly technical subjects and systems embedded within digital devices. Rich, visual communication makes sophisticated technical ideas accessible and that, folks, is what screencasting is all about. By turning our virtual desktops into rich media screencasting lets us learn via our most basic senses — our eyes and our ears.

Add the ability to share your activities within the virtual desktop quickly over the web and the data creation / consumption life cycle speeds up. What’s the best way to show people how to utilize the shark tracking data that’s now available? With a screencast of course. What’s the best way to explain the meaning of the data? That’s a bit more complex, but here too a screencast is an excellent medium.

Perhaps, the economic news has got me reaching for straws, but there certainly seems to be a flurry of new screencasting tools popping up on the market and an increasing amount of screencasts in circulation. Maybe, just maybe its because of the quick maturation of self-sustaining data ecosystems / communities on the World Wide Web.