Trendsurfing: Video-sharing websites (The Times)
By David Rowan
Nothing much on TV this weekend? Well, why not watch a stranger's baby laughing for the first time, or a couple of students in China miming awkwardly along to the Backstreet Boys? Suddenly the internet is buzzing with the latest trend in the citizens' media revolution: the ability to upload your amateur home movies and make them available online to the rest of the world. Thanks to a bunch of new video-sharing websites, many of them free to use, thousands of non-professionals are making their personal video footage public with barely a thought. Not only are many of these films finding reasonable audiences, but some are even attaining the cult-like status that has hundreds of other websites linking to them.
On websites such as YouTube (youtube.com), Vimeo (vimeo.com) and Ourmedia.org, you can watch birthday candles being excitedly blown out, pet poodles being dressed up, and misguided attempts to sing karaoke at one particularly drunken party. Some sites offer the option of restricting access to nominated family and friends, but others play directly on that fundamental human weakness, the desire to attract strangers' attention. It feels disconcertingly voyeuristic to find yourself dropping in to someone else's back-garden firework display or country-cottage family holiday. But by placing their clips in the public domain, and even "tagging" them with key words that will show up in searches, the films' creators, you must assume, are delighted to have you watching.
The trend is one more example of the web destroying the old barriers between content creators and consumers. Just as personal weblogs have let anyone publish their writing, and image-sharing websites such as Flickr allow amateur photographers to show off their work, the new video-sharing sites are drawing hundreds, sometimes thousands of viewers to clips recorded on low-end camcorders or even mobile phones. Intuitive, easy-to-use software makes it simple for even the least technically inclined among us to make our footage "live", in some cases for a small fee, in others without charge. The growth of broadband helps too, with download delays no longer feeling as if they had been designed by Virgin Cross Country rail managers.
Don't take my word that video-sharing is the next big thing. Sequoia Capital, the venture-capital firm which spotted early opportunities at a couple of small start-ups called Google and Yahoo, has already put a reported $5 million into YouTube. Another VC firm, First Round, has invested in a video-publishing outfit called VideoEgg. You can see why they are excited about the commercial possibilities of user-generated video: unlike the tormented geniuses propping up the Groucho Club bar, these filmmakers have no expectation of being paid. They also have a remarkable aptitude for spreading the word virally when they discover something that excites them. No wonder MTV is creating an entire broadband channel devoted to viewers' clips.
Still, you may not want to sell the TV set just yet. My afternoon online was not entirely successful in locating the next great wave of directorial talent. At Vimeo, the delights included a clip of a man called Akien simply eating his Big Mac (which had apparently been viewed 124 times) and a little boy called Drummond having his snotty nose wiped. At YouTube, one of the hottest clips - watched 300,000 times - consisted of those two Chinese students in their bedroom lip-synching tediously along to the Backstreet Boys. That may be democracy in action. But somehow it makes you grateful for those elitist old-economy dinosaurs we knew as television schedulers.
(The Times Magazine, November 19 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE TRENDSURFING COLUMNS HERE . . .
Nothing much on TV this weekend? Well, why not watch a stranger's baby laughing for the first time, or a couple of students in China miming awkwardly along to the Backstreet Boys? Suddenly the internet is buzzing with the latest trend in the citizens' media revolution: the ability to upload your amateur home movies and make them available online to the rest of the world. Thanks to a bunch of new video-sharing websites, many of them free to use, thousands of non-professionals are making their personal video footage public with barely a thought. Not only are many of these films finding reasonable audiences, but some are even attaining the cult-like status that has hundreds of other websites linking to them.
On websites such as YouTube (youtube.com), Vimeo (vimeo.com) and Ourmedia.org, you can watch birthday candles being excitedly blown out, pet poodles being dressed up, and misguided attempts to sing karaoke at one particularly drunken party. Some sites offer the option of restricting access to nominated family and friends, but others play directly on that fundamental human weakness, the desire to attract strangers' attention. It feels disconcertingly voyeuristic to find yourself dropping in to someone else's back-garden firework display or country-cottage family holiday. But by placing their clips in the public domain, and even "tagging" them with key words that will show up in searches, the films' creators, you must assume, are delighted to have you watching.
The trend is one more example of the web destroying the old barriers between content creators and consumers. Just as personal weblogs have let anyone publish their writing, and image-sharing websites such as Flickr allow amateur photographers to show off their work, the new video-sharing sites are drawing hundreds, sometimes thousands of viewers to clips recorded on low-end camcorders or even mobile phones. Intuitive, easy-to-use software makes it simple for even the least technically inclined among us to make our footage "live", in some cases for a small fee, in others without charge. The growth of broadband helps too, with download delays no longer feeling as if they had been designed by Virgin Cross Country rail managers.
Don't take my word that video-sharing is the next big thing. Sequoia Capital, the venture-capital firm which spotted early opportunities at a couple of small start-ups called Google and Yahoo, has already put a reported $5 million into YouTube. Another VC firm, First Round, has invested in a video-publishing outfit called VideoEgg. You can see why they are excited about the commercial possibilities of user-generated video: unlike the tormented geniuses propping up the Groucho Club bar, these filmmakers have no expectation of being paid. They also have a remarkable aptitude for spreading the word virally when they discover something that excites them. No wonder MTV is creating an entire broadband channel devoted to viewers' clips.
Still, you may not want to sell the TV set just yet. My afternoon online was not entirely successful in locating the next great wave of directorial talent. At Vimeo, the delights included a clip of a man called Akien simply eating his Big Mac (which had apparently been viewed 124 times) and a little boy called Drummond having his snotty nose wiped. At YouTube, one of the hottest clips - watched 300,000 times - consisted of those two Chinese students in their bedroom lip-synching tediously along to the Backstreet Boys. That may be democracy in action. But somehow it makes you grateful for those elitist old-economy dinosaurs we knew as television schedulers.
(The Times Magazine, November 19 2005)
. . . AND READ MORE TRENDSURFING COLUMNS HERE . . .
posted by David Rowan at Saturday, November 19, 2005
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