‘Viral’ puts the focus squarely on one metric of success: number of views. Is that really accurate? Is The Annoying Orange better than Break A Leg because it has more views? Is Total Request Live better than The Sopranos? Web video pioneers and the advertisers who want to love them get all hopped up about quantity… without stopping to question the quality. We should know by now that for any industry that wants to sustain and valuate itself, that is an untenable position.

For those of us that want internet video to be a real profession, a career and a valid artistic medium, we have to move past this idea of viral.

We don’t want a world full of only fragments, of aimless memes zipping around the noosphere. We want storyline. We want arcs. We want trilogies. We want new myths and legends. Dammit, we want something worth coming back to again and again and again.

And since we’re referring to web video as a disease (and I heartily second that depiction), then let’s go ahead and define what we want.

We want Chronic Video.

We want to catch a series and then feel like we have no choice but to catch it again. We want to come back to the site or the channel every week, every day even, and feel compelled to see what the new content is. We want an addiction, a chronic affliction.

Viruses are for children. It’s time for the web to grow up.