YouTube Keeps Growing, but for How Long?
Yet it’s unclear how popular these channels are. "Right now if you look at the most used channels on both Yahoo! Video and YouTube, there’re really not that many subscribers to these specific channels. People can subscribe to channels, but how often are they doing it?" says Prescott. "The channels are just an enhanced way to get content delivered to you that you might like, but I don’t think that it’s a killer app that’s going to make or break these online video sites."
Mobile Uploading
"Uploading and sharing video from your mobile phone is easy and requires the following: a mobile device that can take video and sent Multimedia Messaging Services messages; an Internet access or data plan from a service provider, we currently support uploads from Cingulair, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon; and a YouTube member account," says Supan.
The downside to mobile is lower quality video, but the upside is that the number of video phones in use is expected to expand in the next several years, brining that many more potential screens to YouTube and other content publishers.
Blog Video
"The Blog Video feature is just another way YouTube is making sharing and watching video easier and more interactive for the community. YouTube currently supports Blogger, BlogSpot, and LiveJournal with more platforms on the way. People can post videos and text for the video directly to their blog with the click of a button," says a YouTube spokesperson.
The question then becomes, how popular will this feature be given the relatively slow adoption of video blogging through other platforms? "We haven’t seen a huge increase in podcasting. They haven’t become main sites on the web like blogs. So we’ll have to see how it goes in the next few months," says Prescott. "It’s summer and kids are out of school, so people are going to have a lot more time to spend on this stuff, so it’ll be interesting to see if that has an impact."
Video Response
Perhaps the most interesting outgrowth of YouTube’s platform wasn’t something that was inspired by some internal thinktank but rather by simply watching how their users were using their existing technology.
"Video Responses came about when we noticed that our users were communicating with each other through their videos," says Supan. "Text comments and messages are great, but our users created something really innovative completely on their own with Video Responses. It’s been amazing to watch our users create an entirely new mechanism for communicating with one another in this way."
What Goes Up…?
In many ways, YouTube is blazing a trail that only a small handful of companies have come close to traversing in the past. What’s unknown is how their continued growth will compare to those that have come before it. "What are the Internet laws of gravity? Does what goes up must come down? I don’t know," says Prescott.
"We’ve seen that while MySpace has had tremendous growth over the last two years, it’s growth is tending to slow down," Prescott continues. "There tends to be a point of market saturation for these kinds of things, but online video is really only six to eight months old in terms of having some sort of general popularity, so we could see another few years or at least a year of rampant growth until we get a sense for how this will all shake out."