For while now, we’ve been puzzled by the surprisingly large number of industry analysts operating under the assumption that “internet video” represents just another (albeit fast-growing) computer/web browser use case.  It  comes up most often during panel discussions and articles covering the seemingly intractable problem of how to monetize internet video - “how can we get internet video users tolerate a TV-like higher ad load?” is often the point at which shoulders start to shrug, hands get thrown up in the air, and the discussion grinds to a halt.

“By making the internet video user experience more like TV” is one obvious answer - and one that at least allows the discussion to continue…

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Long-form internet video vs. short-form internet video:  As a recent article in the New York Times noted, online video  program length is starting to increase beyond the short 1- or 2-minute user-generated YouTube clips we’re used to snacking on from the workplace.  The NY Times piece correctly identifies at least one factor behind the trend: increased bandwidth and video quality.

However, like most coverage of internet video, the article labors under the short-sighted assumption that “internet video” is necessarily a function of the  computer and the web browser (evidently under a similar assumption, another New York Times article was recently able to proclaim that “Putting Network TV on the Internet is Not Disruptive”).

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2005:  YouTube loses $271 million

2006:  YouTube loses $276 million

2007:  Google buys YouTube for $1.7 billion

Google doesn’t break out how much YouTube is losing.  However, the pesky problem of just how to monetize user-generated video clips remains unsolved while the dramatic growth in YouTube viewership continues unabated - with nothing to offset the costs of scaling up bandwidth and hardware to meet the increasing demand,  is it unreasonable to estimate that YouTube may be losing somewhere upwards of $1 million per day by now?

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Which would happen first - would Apple and Adobe get together to bring Flash (and therefore hulu) to the iPhone, or would hulu (like the similarly Flash-based YouTube service) write a workaround iPhone App?

Historically, Apple has been uninterested in letting Adobe get its Flash Player technology onto the iPhone.  Technical power consumption issues have been often cited,  but given that Google’s Android devices have had Flash support from almost square one, perhaps a more reasonable explanation for Apple’s resistance has had to do with a desire to promote their competing Quicktime technology.   Meanwhile, Flash has become the clear defacto standard for web-based video streaming (according to Adobe, the Flash Player is installed on  98% of US browsers) - and in terms of the still nascent embedded CE hardware market, Adobe alone seems to ‘get it’,  recently making decisive moves to become just as ubiquitous there as they are on the browser (more on that here).
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Before getting involved in technology/new media research and analysis, I made a living as a  musician and composer.  Frankly, at times it was more of a living than at others - but suffice it to say, I was active enough to leave a fair amount of online evidence of a musical career still laying around up there in the cloud.

Although my days of releasing CDs (back when they still released CDs, that is) and writing for TV commercials are largely behind me, every now and then I still google myself (who doesn’t occasionally self-google?) - and a few weeks ago, I started noticing videos with my music showing up in search results on YouTube.  The recordings being used (demos from various older projects) were all otherwise unencumbered and were still being licensed occasionally for other uses, so in an effort to protect myself, I decided to contact YouTube and see if I could draw their attention to the issue.
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One of the most daunting technological challenges we face today is scaling up this old internet of ours to meet the burgeoning consumer demand for bandwidth-intensive real-time applications such as telecommuting, cloud computing, and streaming media.

And as internet video continues to trend from short-form/long-tail/low quality content towards long-form/short-tail/high quality (premium) content (i.e. from YouTube to hulu to TV/films on embedded hardware), exploding consumer demand could bring things to a head even more quickly than currently anticipated.
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Got your attention?  I hope so, because for such a hot technology, there’s a surprising level of misunderstanding and general fuzziness out there around the precise meaning of the term ‘streaming‘ - even among some new media types Who Should Know Better.  Here, then, is a brief clarification (in an effort to keep the eyes-glazing-over syndrome to a minimum, I’ll keep it as short as possible):
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Who doesn’t like Hulu.  As a fan of user interface design, I enjoy the elegance and simplicity of the site almost as much as the video streams themselves.  Launched in 2007 as a joint venture between NBCU and News Corp. (Fox/Paramount), the service has since grown to offer streams from many other content owners as well (recently Disney signed on, and is also reportedly planning to become an equity stakeholder).
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Speculating here about Disney’s recent (quasi-) presence on YouTube, we concluded that:

• YouTube was expanding beyond its core business of UGC (user-generated content) hosting into premium licensed content - and is willing to be just an aggregator to do it.
• Disney was finally ‘dipping its toe into video stream syndication via YouTube before placing its bet on hulu.

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Last week on a panel discussion in New York, ABC’s Albert Cheng described how his network was syndicating its content on YouTube - to paraphrase Mr. Cheng, “we supply them with meta data for our shows, but the actual ABC streams themselves still originate from our servers at ABC.”
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