watching an official nijjisanji clip today, I was kind of tickled to see that the captions were right under the notch on my phone, making them unreadable. nijisanji has some of the best ghost clippers in the game, and this is an honest easy oversight to make, but it was one of those small nudging reminders to me that digital video still isn’t easy to do and that online plaforms have indelible impact on how content gets packaged.

designing for the web, you pretty much have to always anticipate different viewports these days. for a long time (read: back when I was drafting wordpress themes), most sites would instead just statically define a width that was expectedly common and be done with it. you designed your content for it to be viewed one way and could instead focus your time on frustrations like browser compatability. when mobile eventually began to overtake desktop traffic, that pretty quickly started to change, and CSS media queries become the cornerstone for what we now consider “proper” responsive web design. video seems deceptively more straightforward in this respect, especially now when you can export to the web once and leave any encoding complexities for the platforms to worry about, or upscaling and resizing to devices. it wasn’t always this way, back when you had to think more carefully about PAL/NTSC, interlacing, burn in, overscan, and a limitless number of other pecularities in the analog video era. of course, content still had to be repackaged and reformated for different aspect ratios like TV and movie screens, but there were reasonable limits of what to expect and there were standards you could consult. video on the web lets you pretty much not have to worry about most of this now unless you really go looking for it, like when digitizing old content.

safe area is a still a pretty familiar concept in the world of video, mainly for chyrons and things of a similar sort these days, and was pretty much an unavoidable concept when overscan was necessary. when phone notches and pills had a similar effect in covering up viewing area (say what you will about their introduction to begin with), the solution to ease both viewers and creators was pretty simple in software: fake the aspect ratio or just let the user control zoom during playback. today’s online platforms, in their infinite wisdom, have ignored this basic pattern. youtube shorts and tiktok take up the full screen’s real estate and can’t be adjusted, so in a situation like this, the content has to be reformated to fix an issue that was already solved before it began; in youtube’s case, older short clips got reclassified as shorts, making them affected by the same problem.

there’s a common saying that building on top of a web platform is like building on top of sand, where the expectations and rules for content can change without notice. phone notches may not be new news anymore, and clippers will adjust and learn from this as many of them graduate from hobbyists into professionals and get familiar with a lot of the things I mentioned above, but it’s really only because platforms have forced them to and unflinchingly rewrite expectations for how content can be presented all the time. today, it was a simple frustration with safe area. yesterday, it was the push for more short-form content at the expense of the long-form. tomorrow, it might be something else that upends what kinds of content get made entirely.