Front-page story in today’s San Jose Mercury News: The new must-see on your PC: YouTube. Video-sharing shifting entertainment options. Excerpt:
Allen Ng’s YouTube habit is eating into his TV habit.
Every chance he gets, the 14-year-old from Fremont checks the Web site YouTube to watch short videos of badminton clips, excerpts of Chinese movies and funny, amateur productions made and posted by strangers from around the world. At school, the buzz among Allen’s friends isn’t about TV but about quirky YouTube videos — like the Norwegian man recently performing as a human sound effects machine.
“I go to YouTube when I get bored,” Allen says.
YouTube and other video-sharing Web sites signal a shift in the way entertainment will be made and consumed in the future. They’re creating a new form of television that’s at once personal, grass-roots and unfettered.
With the emergence of technology for easily sharing video over the Internet, viewers are gaining the autonomy to choose what, when and where they watch — be it on an iPod, laptop or desktop computer. And the masses are getting an opportunity to create and experiment with video while bypassing the central filter of a TV network. …
“People don’t want to be the next Spielberg but they want to express themselves,” says J.D. Lasica, executive director of Ourmedia, a not-for-profit Web site for videos and other content.
Oh, and for those wondering how videos get promoted to YouTube‘s front page, it’s not done by the community — they’re hand-pcked by Kevin Donahue, vice president of programming.
YouTube, the current leader of the pack:
– has 12.5 million visitors a month
– serves more than 50 million videos a day
– accepts 40,000 new videos per day (no estimate on how many of those are infringing)
The article was accompanied by a graphic, which I don’t see online so I’ll reproduce it here:
Watching video on the Web: monthly visitors
YouTube 12.5 million
MSN Video 9.5 million
vids.myspace.com 8.95 million (look for MySpace to be No. 1 within 6 months)
Google Video, 7.28 million
AOL Video 5.4 million
Break.com 2.81 million
video.search.yahoo.com 2.63 million
iFilm 2.44 million
Atom Films 1.92 million
Metacafe 1.69 million
Guba.com 1.2 million
By the way, word is that Yahoo will be launching its own video site (apart from search) tomorrow.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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