BACKGROUND: Online search giant Google has purchased online video-sharing giant YouTube for $1.65 billion.
CONCLUSION: The purchase doesn’t suddenly make online video important – it rather underscores the fact that online video is important because it will have a significant impact on the way we all interact with media.
For those of you who read your news via RSS feed, chat via skype, digg social networking and have a tag cloud on your blog, the following admonition is unnecessary.
You can head back to geek-land (and we mean geek in the most complimentary and self-descriptive way) and check out how many trackbacks you got on your recent post about your plan to market your personal global microbrand through viral video.
The rest of you, listen up.
Google’s Oct. 9 purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion dollars underscores a fact: video on the Web is important.
It’s important to you as a consumer because it’s likely to have a big impact not just on your computer video viewing habits, but also on how you interact with your television, computer, smartphone, PSP, etc., in coming years.
It’s important to you as a parent because it means your kids have one-click access to an amazing cultural, intellectual and artistic resource – and one click-access to some pretty sleazy material as well.
It’s important to you as an employer, because your entire staff has just spent the last one minute and 29 seconds watching a dancing kitty cat video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpA2tMrQ4RU).
YouTube is a video-sharing Web site. You can view and upload homemade videos as well as clips from television shows and movies. It’s a wonderland of self-expression and wasteland of copyright violation.
It has tools that make it easy for bloggers to embed the video clips directly into their own Web pages, causing popular videos to spread virally through the consciousness of the Web at incredible speed.
However, there is no guarantee that popularity equals quality, although there may be some correlation between popularity and inanity (see the above referenced kitty cat video, the “Stars Wars kid”, and others.)
According to YouTube, people watch more than 100 million of these clips a day.
That’s a lot of video, a lot of traffic and a lot of eyeballs – Google thinks $1.65 billion dollars worth. Even though the 20-month-old YouTube has yet to make money, its growth has been amazing.
Google hopes to turn all of the eyeballs YouTube is capable of rounding up into advertising revenue, as well as to position itself as the premiere company for online video delivery – and create massive leverage to negotiate with content creators, including movie and television production companies.
There’s not too much disagreement among pundits as to whether Google’s purchase was a good one. But there’s some consensus that Google has also bought itself some legal risks.
There’s plenty of controversy around YouTube’s content – especially copyrighted video. Some media companies and performers have embraced YouTube’s viral video as a marketing tool (see Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report for a prime example). Other media companies are fighting to keep their video off the site.
(YouTube’s terms of use policy asks people to upload only works to which they have clear copyright ownership, but this does not prevent copyrighted material from appearing constantly.)
So what’s this mean for those folks who aren’t in the business of creating or selling video content: movies, television shows or dancing kitty cats?
Well, for one thing, it may yet make you a video content producer. The barrier to entry is low, the cost is almost nil (most digital cameras now also shoot video and audio and video editing programs come packaged standard with new computers).
What America’s Funniest Home Videos did on television, YouTube could and is doing on the Web – minus the network gatekeepers who might have decided your video wasn’t funny enough for the show. Everybody gets to play.
The funniest, weirdest, worst or best stuff bubbles to the top of the meme pool and gets the most exposure. But even the dullest stuff (which must have been interesting to at least one person, once) has a home.
And the ability to hop on YouTube and search through countless video clips for whatever interest may spark one’s curiosity means that our expectations for video are being reengineered. The paradigm shift from standard network television to cable with its huge selection and well of niche content will be repeated, this time by on demand digital video, delivered over the Web to computers, television sets, smartphones and who knows what’s next.
So what do you do? Keep on eye on your kids. The revolution’s begun and it’s probably all going to work out for the best, but keep your kids on the computer in the family room, just in case, and look over their shoulders often.
And check it out yourself. YouTube is not just a fascinating tool for sharing, cataloguing and viewing video clips, it’s also a foreshadowing of a mode of media consumption we are only just beginning to imagine, and which will likely arrive before we’re done imagining it. Don’t blink.
It has tools that make it easy for bloggers to embed the video clips directly into their own Web pages, causing popular videos to spread virally through the consciousness of the Web at incredible speed.
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