The Evolution of Online Video

Part Two: The Videoverse

by Jennie Josephson

To really appreciate online video's mad stampede into the public consciousness, consider this: it took almost 25 years for streaming media to go from research theory to a nineteen second clip called 'Me at the zoo', the first video posted on the earliest version of YouTube.



Seven months after the video sharing website site official December 2005 launch, YouTube estimated its users viewed one hundred million videos every day (later confirmed by web monitoring firm comScore). Two years after that, the total number of online videos viewed across all websites rose to 13.5 billion in one month alone.

So what caused this quantum leap? Online video pioneers like broadcast.com and iFilm revolutionized streaming media by bringing the types of entertainment you'd traditionally see at the movies or on TV to the internet. (And yes, episodes of Quantum Leap are now available to 'watch instantly' on Netflix).

But it was YouTube that made it possible for internet users themselves to become the best entertainment on the web. And since the total number of videos posted on YouTube is probably only exceeded by the number of words written about it, here are mine:

Watch this.



YouTube, acquired in 2006 by Google for $1.65 billion in stock, became a window into the soul (or bedroom) of everyone with a webcam. The playground of goofy kittens and goofier humans was above all a place for users to share their passions in visual form. User generated content was now a complete multimedia experience.





Inevitably, much of what people wanted to share came from their old VHS tapes, brought up from the basement and digitized for the web. This grainy collection of old TV shows, commercials and standup routines flooded YouTube in a wave of collective nostalgia.

Soon users were re-imagining those shows, and especially movie trailers, in video mash-ups. Bootlegged episodes of current shows like "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "The Daily Show" were also posted regularly, as were the ever-popular clips of CNN anchors behaving badly.



There was only one little problem with this quick and dirty marriage of old media and new: it was all copyrighted material, mostly owned by major movie studios and television networks. And they were not pleased.

Having already lost large parts of their audiences to the web (and video games), these media giants followed the lead of the beleaguered music industry and sent a flurry of take down notices and cease-and-desist orders to YouTube and its users.

Viacom, still smarting from all those bootlegged "Daily Show" episodes, filed a one billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube's parent company Google in 2007. Of course, "The Daily Show," had its own hilarious solution to the Viacom-YouTube conundrum. Demetri Martin explains Viacom lawsuit using stick puppets and a small child.

But slowly, the realization that had long eluded the music industry began to sink in. Fans didn't post copyrighted material online out of spite; they did it because they cared about the product. So maybe suing your biggest fans and the company that helped them promote your product was Not So Smart.

After a year or two of quaking in fear, stumbling around in the dark and looking completely out of touch, the major studios and networks put their lawyers back in their holsters and attempted to make the web work for them.

In March 2007, Fox and NBC announced a partnership to create their own commercial-supported website to stream TV shows and movies from various content partners. Initially dismissed as a corporate clone of YouTube, Hulu officially launched a year later with a deep bench of popular TV shows, and was rewarded with more than 200 million videos viewed in November 2008. CBS recently announced it would put more than 1,000 full episodes of shows from their own group of content providers on its newly purchased site, TV.com.

Meanwhile YouTube, still the undefeated champ, explored ways to appease rights-holders. In 2007, YouTube introduced a program to identify and manage copyrighted material. Some media companies stopped suing YouTube and began advertising with them. (Viacom? Still suing). And leading cyber-law experts like Lawrence Lessig began to wonder why there couldn't be a better way to manage intellectual property. Lawrence Lessig argues about intellectual property on The Colbert Report.

The latest trend in online video is how to make it profitable; not just for mega-sites like YouTube and Hulu, but also for video creators. This isn't a new idea (remember AtomFilms?), but online video is now a much larger slice of the entertainment pie. In addition the short ads that run as you watch your favorite TV shows online, there are now a slew of sites like blip.tv, metacafe.com, and break.com helping independent video producers create and "monetize their video content." (If only that poor Star Wars kid had known!) Another significant development is the ability to track viewers once a video has left its home site. Showing someone else's video was once a sure-fire way to get sued; now most video sites willingly offer up the code to 'embed' their videos across the web.

Today the online videoverse is dizzyingly huge. As the creators of user-generated videos and the owners of 'corporate entertainment content' take the first small steps towards peaceful coexistence, every year bring us closer to the Holy Grail of Home Entertainment: "Anything I want, easily found and immediately available, wherever I want it (on the couch or on the phone) for free or cheap."

And when that day comes, I am moving to Montana. But until then, when searching for online video 'gold' in the wild, wild cyber west, it's helpful to have a trusted guide. So may I humbly suggest eGuiders; a new site where the recommendations of real humans replace the cold algorithms of a search engine. Believe me, it's a lot more efficient than all those forwarded emails you keep getting…

---