Youtube, the outrageously popular Video site now serves over 100 million video views per day. What is even more interesting is that YouTube serves as a virtual water cooler for millions of TV viewers:

YouTube videos account for 60 percent of all videos watched online, the company said. Videos are delivered free on YouTube and the company is still working on developing advertising and other means of generating revenue to support the business.

Youtube serves upto 100 Million Videos a day - CNet

Popular television events have had played significant part in the popularity of You tube. The famous World Cup incident with Zinedine Zidane showed how the power of Youtube to quickly aggregate viewers. Another dramatic incident was the Whitehouse Press Core Dinner with Stephen Colbert. This quickly became an internet favorite, so much so that CSPAN forced Youtube to remove it from the site. Other examples are the Daily Show and Colbert Show. These are very popular cable channel programs that offer fake news (Daily Show) and fake punditry (Colbert Show). These show have lives of their own on the cable channels, but with clips of the shows loaded shortly after they air it adds a whole new life to these shows.

Paramount Pictures is using the platform for another use and that is promotion of the film “An inconvenient truth” (which I have seen and recommend). They have built an online profile and movie channel with the trailers and even a parody clip from Futurama with Al Gore promoting the movie. You can see that here.

YouTube was founded in February, 2005 by Chad Hurley (CEO), Steve Chen (CTO), and Jawed Karim (advisor), who were all early employees of PayPal. Prior to PayPal, Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The domain name “YouTube.com” was activated on February 15, 2005, with the website launching shortly thereafter.

The site’s popularity surged in December 2005 when it hosted the popular Lazy Sunday clip from a Saturday Night Live broadcast. In February, 2006, NBC Universal asked YouTube to remove several copyrighted NBC video clips, including Lazy Sunday and 2006 Olympics clips, from their site.

Recently the major networks have a change in heart in the attitude to Youtube. Sean McManus, President of CBS News had a change of heart after meeting Chad Hurley.

Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports, now says that CBS is rethinking its attitude. “You’ve got to find the fine line between the great promotion YouTube gives a network, and protecting our rights,” he told TV Week. “Our inclination now is, the more exposure we get from clips like that, the better it is for CBS News and the CBS television network, so in retrospect we probably should have embraced the exposure, and embraced the attention it was bringing CBS, instead of being parochial and saying ‘let’s pull it down.’”

Youtube represents sea change in how video is used, consumed and shared. In it’s short life You tube has fundamentally shifted :

• It is the prime social mechanism for the sharing of video clips. Couple this with Tivo and you have a killer combination
• It is being used as a live journal/diary for teenagers. They are using webcams and Youtube as a video diary system where they can share thoughts and feelings. These are predominately female diaries.
• The use of video cameras inside mobile phones and Youtube has exploded the phenomena mobloging.
• The use of the Youtube platform as a promotional tool, otherwise known as Viral Video. A good example is the Mentos/Coke Video
• A repository for archive video including old music videos and TV show clips.

Youtube is fast becoming a online cultural icon along with Google and Yahoo. The challenge for YouTube is how to build a business around this community. I have no doubt that they can do this like Myspace, and Google have done before. The question is what challenges will face Youtube along the way.

The Watercooler metaphor is a good start to understand the power of the short video to bring people together. It just makes the watercooler talk just that more interesting.

Technorati Tags: youtube, social+networking, web+2.0, al+gore, futurama

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