YouTube Not Telly

Grab your popcorn! Find a comfortable chair! Click onto YouTube! Select your movie and settle for a fun evening! With millions of pages of movies at your mouse click, you will never bore yourself with repeats! And guess what! You set the evening programme. No big biz interference in your selection! No boring commentators in your face! And best of all, no interruptive, repetitive, mind numbing advertising.

Sounds too good to be true! So good in fact, Google coughed up over $US 1.65 billion and turned three clever geeks into Web glitterati. YouTube is Time Magazine's Invention of the Year for 2006. Why? Well, as Times put it, "YouTube created a new way for millions of people to entertain, educate, shock, rock and grok one another on a scale we've never seen before."

Scrub the hype! What exactly is YouTube? Well, it's a web site that allows people to upload, share and watch their own and their friends videos. And it doesn't matter what format the clip is in 'cos YouTube converts the uploaded file into a Flash movie which can be viewed using any web browser. Each day 65 or 70,000 plus videos are uploaded to be viewed, rated, commented on or replied to in video by the millions of people around the world who seem to live on the Tube. Forget the telly, mate!

And that's just it! You can forget the TV. Type in www.youtube.com and search for your favourite soap. Chances are the latest episodes just screened in USA can be downloaded in 10 minute segments. What, napstering video content? That's what I thought too, but no, it is not a copyright infringing, sharing site like Napster. It seems that commercial material is uploaded by its producers in order to "wet the appetite" and entice viewers to their mainstream channels. Commercial TV is wooing YouTubers to shore up their advertising income streams.

So, what sort of movies are on YouTube? Categories include Arts & Animation, Autos & Vehicles, Comedy, Entertainment, Music, News & Blogs, People, Pets & Animals, Science & Technology, Sports, Travel & Places and Video Games. What age groups? It would appear that videos are made by all age groups. No surprise, the young happily make videos to share. I found a few videos made by elderly chaps, one well into his 90s who reminisced about his experiences in the Pacific in World War II. Another series of videos made by an elderly Englishman, a radar technician in World War II called Peter, inspired an equally elderly and lonely viewer to make and share his own clips. And people are enjoying watching all these clips judging by the video blogs in response.

And YouTube has the potential to be life altering. Take the video clips of a young woman reviewing techno gadgets on YouTube; so impressed was the BBC's Mike Worsley with her "upbeat and quirky" style that she has been offered a job as a presenter on the BBC Sunday afternoon television program.

Commentators on all things to do with the Internet are stunned by the potential of YouTube to revolutionise media. Suddenly they see the millions of faceless consumers jaded by a television diet of violent news, shallow soap relationships and farfetched reality shows, jilting the once popular box for the interactive experience made possible on the Web. Certainly, sharing "do it yourself" video adds a new dimension to communication. So, turn on your webcam or fire up your video recorder and I'll meet you, popcorn in hand, at YouTube!

Background information

1. YouTube

2. Time Best Invention 2006: YouTube

3. BBC signs up YouTube Gadget Reviewer

4. The Age: How YouTube became hot property.