Nora the piano-playing cat is no longer the main attraction as other programming comes on YouTube.
Since watching YouTube’s Entertainment Matters keynote at the Consumer
Electronics Show in January, I’ve spent more and more time pondering YouTube.
And YouTube has been giving me more and more to ponder, as the site is moving
away from Nora the Piano Cat and distraught Britney Spears fans to more ambitious
content.
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that YouTube is getting ready to
burn down the filmed entertainment business as we know it. In fact, the match has
already been struck. We just haven’t felt the heat yet.
There’s been a lot of talk about targeted advertising and how that builds revenue
streams from YouTube, which reassures content producers and owners that there
will be a way to make money off Web video even as audiences splinter to
infinitessimal shards. That’s fine, but I think that talk assumes we’ll be watching the
same things, just watching them through YouTube instead of cable or broadcast.
But how people watch shapes what they watch. As people shift to watching YouTube
and other Web video services, longform video could become a niche product, just as
opera and classical music became niche products in a market dominated by pop
songs.
YouTube as we’ve known it epitomized two trends of the Internet era. First, it
became the ocean into which most user-generated video eventually flowed. It already
comprises a universe of videos more vast than any cable service. And while YouTube
may not be the only video site, it has been able to get to “lock-in” — it’s the site almost
everyone uses. Once a technology locks in, it’s very difficult to dislodge it. Apple is
locked in with digital music and tablets. Facebook is locked in with social media.
YouTube is well positioned for similar domination.
Second, there were no charts or established routes on that ocean; each viewer had to
find her own way to the videos she wanted, and there wasn’t a lot of help. That
limited its potential. But that’s changing.
The trends are similar to what happened to recorded music. Before the invention of
the phonograph, popular songs tended to be long, with lots of verses. But the 78 rpm
record could hold just three to five minutes on a side. That gave birth to the three-
minute pop song. For listeners, though, it proved onerous to change records every
three minutes. That led to lots of innovations: Record changers that let you stack up
disks, then eat dinner or dance with your sweetheart; radio stations that played
records and hired music aficionados who chose what disks to play and in what order
— “disk jockeys.” These things let the three-minute pop song thrive, in part because
they relieved the listener of the burden of finding and queueing up music. You could
just decide what station or DJ to listen to, or put on your records, and stop thinking
about it for a while.
YouTube has been quietly introducing its equivalents of the radio station and the
record changer. It has introduced and encouraged channels, a group of videos
delivered by a single person or company, which from the audience’s point of view
work like a cable channel or a radio station. They have also been encouraging viewers
to create playlists. With social media, you can pick up your friends’ playlists. Or you
can take playlists from experts, who become the equivalent of DJs.
The analogy YouTube’s people use is the DVR, which you program to record stuff you
care about, and the remote control, which you use to choose what you want to watch
right this minute. They’re working on providing both.
YouTube apps now appear on Smart TVs, smartphones and tablets, just as radio
stations are in the living room, the car and transistor radios. Today it’s laborious to
find and choose videos on TVs, which lack a keyboard. But that’s going to change,
and fast. As tablets and smartphones gain the capability to control TVs, it’ll be easy to
find a video on the second screen, then send it to the TV. As TV voice interfaces come
in, you won’t need a keyboard to search for what you want.
These innovations aren’t a big deal for watching “Downton Abbey” or “Avatar.” But
they make it easier to watch a lot of shortform content. That’s likely to change mass
viewing habits.
I see auds shifting from half-hour, hourlong and longform to shortform videos,
selected and queued in advance, then streamed like your own personal TV channel.
After all, we’re still listening to three-minute pop songs decades after 78 rpm records
vanished.
As someone who likes longform storytelling, that makes me a little sad.
But I’m sure I can find something on YouTube to cheer me up.
By DAVID S. COHEN – VARIETY – Thu., Mar. 15, 2012