Just to demonstrate the point, I recorded this post as video — quickly and clumsily — and uploaded it to YouTube.
In the explosion of the new television, what we need now is not more content or distribution — we have plenty of both on YouTube alone. What we need is a way to find the good stuff, the the stuff we want to watch.
And where do we find everything else in life these days? Google, of course. So Google’s acquisition of YouTube makes perfect sense. It can be the world’s biggest TV Guide.
But that will not work if all Google brings to this is search. For video is not about information. It is about entertainment, about taste. And though some algorithms have tried, none can yet program the perfect network for me. Neither, for that matter, can television executives. But my friends can.
And that is what YouTube brings to its deal with Google: people. Though Google depends on the wisdom of the crowd, it still respects us only in aggregate as a mass.
YouTube made the new TV social. It enabled people to recommend the good – or at least amusing — stuff not just by their clicks and ratings but also by their actions: YouTube allowed us to put good videos up on our blogs. YouTube enabled us to become network programmers.
I believe that the serving of 100 million videos is the least valuable service that YouTube provides. Serving all those videos was an important and insightful step in the process of exploding television as we knew it and handing its power to the people. But I believe the end of that process will have us serving videos from wherever — from Google or our own blogs and servers or via peer-to-peer technology that vastly reduces the cost of distribution.
So then how does Google make money on those videos? How does it serve advertising? The same way it does now: Google does not make us come to it and its ads; Google takes its ads to where we already are. It serves ads on my own blog.
If the Google purchase of YouTube is successful, it will learn how to listen to people as individuals with taste and timely opinions and use that to enable us to find the video we each want to see wherever it is. It will make YouTube a key channel of distribution even for old, big networks (witness this deal, announced yesterday, between CBS TV and YouTube). And then Google will sell advertising on that new TV screen, powering the explosion of the new television.
Welcome to Google Nichecasting Networks.
(Here and here are earlier Media Guardian columns I wrote about this explosion of TV.)
