Hey STHers! We are about to enter a period that I am very nervous about. Over the next two months, I am going to be doing three international trips (two multi-country trips to Europe and one to Taiwan), and at least two domestic trips. During that period, we are also going to be moving the STH studio into a new location, and then I will be getting married. To say that the next 10 weeks or so are going to be fun is probably an understatement. We are trying something this week that I wanted to get some STH user feedback on, a short MikroTik RB5009 video.

Here is the new video, in a short 1-minute format. It is shot vertically for YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, and etc.

The challenge Rohit and I had with his MikroTik RB5009UPr+S+IN PoE Router Mini Review is simply that I wanted to do a video, but we are going to cap out at a maximum of two long-form videos per week at our normal pace. I wanted to do a video for this one for some time, but we simply have not had publishing spots for doing a review and video.

The idea is a quick 1-minute overview video to accompany reviews. It was very challenging. I scripted this one out. The script read was around 2:08. We then cut out almost everything that sounded like context, and cut every extra frame we could to reach 1 minute. Our version was 59 seconds and 29 frames but YouTube has us at 1:01 for some reason. There are other challenges with this format as we film and take STH photos for horizontal video, not vertical video.

I wanted to get some STH reader feedback on what they thought about this format. I know many readers like to read because they can do it at work, and they can skim. 15-minute in-depth videos I know take longer to consume. Perhaps this 1-minute format is easier?

For our readers that do not care about video, I get it. At the same time, it is important for the health of STH that we have a meaningful video side. My hypothesis is that something like this might help bridge a few gaps:

Of course, there will be folks that do not like this format, but it is something that I thought might be worth trying. This is now the second short video after the NVIDIA A100 ChatGPT one so it is still a very new format for us. Still, we need to keep evolving the format of STH so experiments are important.