Broadcast Future?

We all know the race has been on for a while to get a site up and running that can supply video to the market, when and where they want it.  YouTube was started a little over a year ago and has progressed amazingly.  But what does this mean to the traditional channels.  Will the web take it all away from them?  YouTube has more than 35million videos watched each day, so you would have to say people like it.

Founded in February 2005, YouTube is a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through the web. YouTube allows members to easily upload and share video clips on their own site, or across the Internet through websites, blogs, and e-mail. The company currently delivers more than 35 million video views every day with over 35,000 new videos uploaded daily.

Now of course a lot of these videos are rubbish.  Let's face it.  Who wants to watch a cockroach controlled robot?  Personally, I have better thing to do.  And let's not get into production values.  There is heaps of 'mum & dad' stuff on here that is really just crap.

But amongst this rubbish there is the good stuff.  And it's a wonderful way for talented people to get a start in the industry.

What these sites offer is a way to get to the topics you're interested in, quickly and easily.  Then you can be kept up to date with new releases that involve your chosen interest.  The major thing being, it's free.  You can upload your own video and download completely free of charge.

Sites like this haven't gone by without notice to marketers.  You can search through the videos and learn an awful lot about what people want.  For instance some people have shopping videos, showing what they buy.  And companies are getting into the act as well.  A trailer for "Scary Movie 4" recently had 250,000 downloads in the first 24 hours and a million within a week.  Another ad for Nike starring Ronaldinho has had over 3million downloads and has been passed around through email as well.  Nice one Nike.

The main problem with sites like YouTube and Google Video is regulation.  Being 'community' based, they rely on the people to report video that doesn't fit within the sites policy.  That can be hard and has led to some violations of copyright.

So what's the future of these community sites.  Well, music sites in the past that were based on the same philosophy have fallen over. Napster was a big one.  And also iTunes is doing very well selling video, especially music video clips.

But there seems little doubt that people are moving to the net more and more for video.  Lets hope that professional television makers can remain up there as major content providers no matter what the delivery method is.