Youtube rolled out a new feature this week, and this may change entertainment and how people get entertainment profoundly.
The idea is to provide structure for people to create interesting content and then generate enough revenue from their work to fund actual production values and quality music. Up until now, much of Youtube has been people filming themselves doing a belly flop in the family pool and then 9 year olds commenting “FAIL!”… Not particularly compelling…. or people ripping off copyrighted material and posted it online until someone notices and it gets pulled.
With a channel, you subscribe to the content of that person (or production company) and then you are told when they have new content available. Just in the brief time I was poking around, there was a guy who takes videos of roller coasters… a woman teaching how to cook food.. some ditsy blond going to the beach with her friends. This is brand new of course – there have been prolific YouTube posters, but it was difficult to navigate to find their stuff. Now with structure, this concept is going to explode.
Another important feature is registered users are allowed to vote on the content and the quality of the comments made about the post. This is a notion that’s been active for years on web sites like Digg and Slashdot. If you post poorly produced, not thought out junk it won’t be seen…. if you work hard, use good equipment and do some work editing and tuning the clip, you’ll surface quickly as being high quality.
There is a musician who wrote a song about United Airlines breaking his guitar.. According to his song, baggage handlers at O’Haire in Chicago were throwing around his band’s guitars (which they saw them do), and when they got to their destination, his guitar was broken. United did the old customer service runaround, and ultimately told him “No” after he went through all the hoops to make him go away. So he wrote a song and put it on youtube. 3.4 million views and counting – United has now seen the error of their ways.
Welcome to the digital democracy – where you can’t control information, and you can’t tell people what they have to watch or listen to.
The one issue I see is that people tend to want to see things like videos of people being killed or hurting themselves (similar to the movie series “Faces of Death”). That may have some unintended consequences down the road.