With YouTube, Google puts its competitors in a jam

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Not the same thing

StreamingFaith.com is addressing the tiny niche of religious nuts who think regular TV is evil (well, other than maybe Sky Angel). If they get enough ads for this relatively small market, more power to them, but it's not even close to the same thing YouTube has tried to address.

As far as you knowing "what works and what doesn't", I'm laughing at that, and I know the YouTube and Google folks would, too. I don't think you even understand what YouTube does, and why Google paid the 1.6B for it.

Simply put, YouTube is the eBay of independent video. Sure it's bad quality (Director accounts only allow 100MB max, even though the clip lengths are unlimited), but that's not a bad thing. I have my content on YouTube precisely because it doesn't really compete with my DVD sales -- the clips I put up (varying from excerpts to whole videos) will spread the word about my videos more than they'll detract from video sales.

As we've seen with independent music on the net, getting the word out there is the big problem. Piracy, to an independent producer/director/artist isn't an issue. Sure, the pirated stuff put up there may bother The Big Guys. Or not.. again, the limits of the system may relegate that to being a non-issue. They already had some major content providers playing nice, before the Google buy.

Like your StreamingFaith, they're providing something different, but unlike that, it's something for everyone, not a tiny fringe. Both markets are fine markets if you scale you expectations accordingly.

YouTube is of course hardly new, tech-wise. But that's hardly even the issue. I have no doubt that bandwidth demands would have killed off YouTube before too long, had they not either been acquired or developed a functional profit model. But their basic concept -- an outlet for any video with tens of millions of eyes, that's key. And like eBay, another user-driven model, there's little chance for a #2 winning in the long run.

Sure, they have to deal with the piracy, one way or another. But I think the content providers understand the difference.... I found 6 minutes of one of my films on YouTube today, without permission. My real problem wasn't the upload, but why they had over twice the views of any of my stuff...

Posted by: dhaynie@...   Posted on: 10/13/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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