I Like to Watch

Time for another check in on the incredibly fast and powerful online video transformation.

It's been about seven months since the "Lazy Sunday" SNL video shot YouTube past Google Video, into the mainstream media and onto any respectable tech/media hot list.

How hot?  And, what kind of list?  YouTube's co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley was on the uber-A-list Allen & Co. Sun Valley media conference last week.  It took Google five years to get invited.  Hurley joined Murdoch, Buffett, and Bloomberg 17 months after launching YouTube.  More than that, he "was the most talked about person of the event."

Back in February, folks like AOL/Netscape exec Jason Calacanis (and Digg emulator) were saying that "YouTube is not a real business" primarily because of its alleged reliance on copyrighted work to drive traffic.   Our guess is that Hurley and the head of CBS weren't talking about imaginary business in their 45-minute sit down in Sun Valley.

Yes, but talk is cheap and schmooze is free.  How about some numbers?  Okay, get this:

Last week, was the worst week ever for U.S. TV ratings. 

What could former couch-surfers be doing with their time?  More than a 100 million videos are watched a day on YouTube.  And, during the course of the week, visitors are spending an average of a half-hour at the site.  Despite naysayers, don't expect this growth to slow.  Tomorrow's MediaWeek reports:

During the week which ended on July 16, the ever-popular online video-sharing site's unique audience soar by a whopping 75 percent to 12.8 million users, up from 7.3 million during the previous week, according to new data released by Nielsen//NetRatings. That traffic jump follows a hard-to-fathom six-month period of exponential growth for the site, as its audience size skyrocketed by nearly 300 percent since the beginning of the year.

There's no question that this is a media revolution.  There's no doubt that YouTube should be able to convert some of this success into becoming a profitable "real" business (they only have a 50-ish person staff in a bare-bones office above a pizza place in Silicon Valley).

But, since this is a tech policy blog, what really isn't known is how this transformation will eventually play out with regulators and legislators as they wrap their heads it.

Already, we do know that:

--Leaders of the European Community are planning to enact legislation that could impose the same regulations held for broadcast TV on Internet video.  The world yawns.

--A similar effort is underfoot in Australia.

--YouTube was recently sued for the first time for copyright infringement.  Not by a big network, but by a freelance journalist.

--The RIAA is closely watching the popularity of lip-synched music on YouTube and member companies are getting restless. 

On the other side of the coin:

--The EFF's digital content legal mind, Fred van Lohmann, says that YouTube is on firm legal footing on copyright issues.  Yes, the EFF was in Napster's corner, but Lohmann's reasonable perspective is echoed others not in the copyleft.

--Technology is being created to help track down copyrighted content on video sites.

--"No Man's Blog" took on the task of creating an all-time YouTube top-100 list.  Of the top-100, 58 were "user generated content" and not direct swipes of music videos, TV shows or movie trailers.  If you dig a bit deeper, you will see that "user generated" doesn't necessarily mean "home made", but you get the point that YouTube isn't completely relying on Saturday Night Live and Anime films for content.  I mean, this video has been viewed nearly 4 million times (and wait for the second dancer)...

What's all this spell?  Internet video is real.  Regulations that will impact it will be, too.  The question is how soon?  And, to what impact on the growth of the fledgling industry?  Watch this space for more.

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