Business 2.0 looks at YouTube:
Everybody wants to be the Flickr of video. One early contender that is gaining momentum is YouTube. All of the hundreds of thousands of short videos clips on the site are shot and uploaded by users....

YouTube serves up an impressive three million video clips every day, and people are uploading 8,000 clips a day. You can share or blog any video on YouTube. Even some advertisers are getting in on the game. The most viewed video is actually a commercial for Nike that shows a Brazilian soccer star practicing some shots on goal. It's been viewed more than one million times.

- jim 12-27-2005 8:48 pm

How did all those users find out about this? Is it different from DTV?
- tom moody 12-27-2005 9:39 pm


Yes it's different. DTV is RSS + BitTorrent so the distribution is decentralized (thanks to BitTorrent) and the downloads just happen automatically in the background (thanks to RSS.)

YouTube is more like flickr (or Google Video,) just a regular website where you can upload your video and/or watch other people's video (all streamed from their servers.)

DTV seems more interesting to me, but maybe you wouldn't want the decentralization of downloads if you had ideas of monetizing the whole thing at some point (in that case you want people coming to your site and downloading it straight from you so that you could show Yahoo! or whoever might buy you some really big numbers.)

I guess people find out about it through links. Some of the videos are very popular, and so get linked from big sites (boing-boing, metafilter, etc...) and when you go to watch the video you see it is hosted on some site called youtube.com and so you go to check it out. Since they are just giving away storage and bandwidth for free it's not that much of a surprise that it has exploded in popularity. But what's their plan? Probably just to sell out to someone bigger - that seems like the only plan people have these days.
- jim 12-27-2005 9:47 pm


Indeed. The mass participation is mainly interesting for what it says about people spending more time with "2-way video" as opposed to just consuming the tube. The video revolution that never actually happened earlier, with VCRs, public access cable, etc.
- tom moody 12-27-2005 9:54 pm





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