Online Video - Just Like Early Days of TV?
Monday, October 27th, 2008Speaking at the MIPCOM Conference in Cannes, France, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley has compared online video to the early days of television. TechCrunch has published the full transcript on its site, but here are my main take-aways:
- YouTube wants to continue partnering with content owners to help them manage and distribute their content and reach new audiences.
- The days of the ‘centralized distribution hub’ are ending. Today’s consumers want access to content on PCs, TVs, mobile phones and social networking pages.
- The convergence of TV and computers is happening now, and it’s happening faster than anyone expected. For example, around 10 billion videos are viewed monthly online in the U.S. alone, 13 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube each minute, and the number of people consuming video on their PCs is higher than ever before. Meanwhile, the online video advertising market will be worth over a billion dollars by 2010, is expected to reach over $3 billion by 2012, and will then exceed $5 billion by 2013.
According to Hurley, online video provides content producers with four big ‘R’ opportunities: Reach, Research, Revenue, and Rights Management.
Firstly, online video enables producers to reach both massive and targeted audiences of millions of viewers. Secondly, it facilitates more accurate research, with analytic tools able to identify who, why and where content is being watched.
Thirdly, global distribution and analytics tools are giving content producers new revenue opportunities. And finally, online video tools are giving content owners better control the use of their content.
You had me until the last one, Chad.
Certain online video platforms, such as YouTube, may be trying to facilitate rights management… but other platforms, such as the various torrent sites, appear to be successfully undermining rights management!
Still, I do think online video and media convergence is something to be excited about. And that’s probably one of the messages Chad was trying to get across in his MIPCOM presentation.
