I’m intrigued by the inclusion of video commentary functionality on TechCrunch, reported and discussed by Darnell here at The Blog Herald already.

Basically, video commenting is posting a video as a comment. You give your thoughts on the post, your angry opinions, your screaming obnoxiousness, whatever, in video form.

Pretty cool, but it certainly has its kinks.

I must say that Loren Feldman’s comment on why it won’t work is pretty valid. I especially think the problem of non-automatic moderation is serious. It’s way too easy to spam comments, both with profanities and actual product spam. Another problem that Loren talks about is the fact that you don’t want to play sound everywhere, at work for instance. Do read his comment.

The reason video comments just won’t work on a larger scale is time.

Think about it, you read a text comment way faster than the time it would take to listen to a video comment saying the same thing. While it might take less time to actually record the comment, compared to write it, listening to 50 comments being a couple of minutes each will take longer than reading the same message in text.

I don’t have time to watch video comments, since I can’t even scan them briefly, like I can with text comments. We’re all time-crunched, and that’s what’s killing video commenting. It’ll be around as a nifty feature of course, but that’s about it.