Television is a tough business. It didn’t use to be. There used to be a controlled market with a limited number of channels and a dependable stream of advertising revenue. Then came satellite and cable and the channels grew dramatically and the advertising revenue had to be shared more broadly. Now the Internet is making its presence felt in the video media market (for that’s what it is).

The disruptive force is YouTube, which dwarfs all other video posting sites – and since it is owned by Google, it’s not in a hurry to make a profit – in fact it’s running at an unhealthy loss. Right now, Google takes adverts for the site, but has few other revenue streams.

Technically, the cost of making video has been collapsing for years. I remember being told, sometime around 1990, that you couldn’t shoot a video for less than $2000 per hour. Now camcorders are ubiquitous and the current/next generation of mobile phones can shoot video. If you don’t cost your own time, shooting video is hobby-cheap or cheaper. This collapse in ptoduction cost wouldn’t have meant much if there had been no way of distributing the output, but YouTube has taken care of that.

YouTube and Politics

The 2006 midterm US elections were the first YouTube elections. The Republican defeat was compounded (but not really caused by) YouTube. The defeat of Senator Paul Allen (Republican), by a small margin, in the race that finally gave the US Senate to the Democrats, had a lot to do with a YouTube video clip of Republican Paul Allen using the term/name “macaca” to refer to a cameraman (who was US born but of Asian Indian decent). It lost him a lot of votes and his ten point lead in the polls vanished.

It wasn’t the only political video on YouTube at the time, by any means. In fact there were many, as politicians of both sides in different Senate and Congress races posted adverts onto this free broadcast/advertising medium—in attempts either to discredit their opponents or promote themselves. Naturally, only a few of these videos attracted large audiences. But use of YouTube exploded in the current election campaign (which seems to go on for ever).

The prime beneficiary of the YouTube revolution has been Barack Obama. His election team has been hugely Internet savvy and the advantage he has on YouTube is enormous. The videos put there, whether direct endorsements, or bizarre side-effects like the “Obama Girl”, have attracted millions and millions of views. The audience numbers are challenging the main stream media and escallating the importance of political web sites, many of which post videos to support news stories.

The YouTube Phenomenon

Politics, if you like, is only one “focus area” but the Internet video coverage is broader and deeper than the news channels. In the end it’s simply a matter of bandwidth. On cable TV, only a small number of news channels are viable, but any amount of content which can be watched at any time can live on the web. The word “channel” is about to become redundant.

YouTube is not a video shop (like iTunes, say) and neither is it a set of channels (like cable TV). It’s actually a vast video wiki mostly of short video clips. You wont find whole movies there, but you can find clips from many of them – including the original of just about every movie cliche known to man. Much of this is in violation of digital rights, but this probably means that digital rights rules need to change. On one hand a video clip is a rights violation and on the other, it is an advert. Because of YouTube, a video clip may never die.

An interesting example of this is provided by the video entitled “Colbert Roasts Bush” from the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. When Stephen Colbert, the guest entertainer at this dinner, actually gave the speech which the video records, it was widely reported in the press, the following day, as “disappointing”, “a poor performance” etc. The posting of the video on YouTube (and also Google Video) supports a quite different opinion—that his performance was both incredibly funny, and very courageous—given that President Bush, whom he was making fun of most, was seated a few feet away.

And there was a good reason for the poor reviews. Among the people Colbert was roasting were the press. This video has now been viewed more than 4 million times on the web, and is among the most popular videos ever posted to the web (although it still trails the Obama Girl.) And although it is now a couple of years old, it is still getting regular hits. The point here is that the main stream media is losing it’s grip. So let’s list the defining points about YouTube:

• So far there’s no commercial model.
• It has invented a new video length – the short clip. Video is now no longer made primarily for television slots (0f 30 mins, 60 mins, 90 mins and 120 mins)
• It has provoked the creation of many video mashups
• Because of YouTube many podcasts have become video podcast.
• It has spawned a video education market, all of it own.
• It’s about video publishing and self-publishing. One outcome is that, as well as Joe Public posting home-made videos, companies can post their own adverts. That changes the concept of advert – because the infomercial becomes a highly attractive idea.
• YouTube is opt-in
• The most important point. YouTube has become the video wiki. There may be many other video sites out there video, but YouTube has such a large percentage of the free video that if you want to see video on, say, animal migration, you just surf YouTube.

In no other area has the Internet created such a strong “monopoly” of information. And it’s one of those situations where the monopoly is self feeding  a bit like Google’s initial cash cow , the Search Engine. In search, most people use Google, because they use Google. They have no idea where else they might go.