If YouTube builds it…

Finally. It’s arrived.

After 3+ years of making around the world squint to watch fuzzy, pixelated video inside a tiny 480 x 320 player, the only internet video distributor that matters just took their first step towards improving the quality of the video viewing experience.

This advancement is beneficial for everyone in the interactive media space. Simply because there is one and only one name in internet video — YouTube. And it’s a particularly important name to fringe adopters (people skewed in ages or demographics that aren’t as likely to be technologically advanced). These millions of people who are working to familiarize themselves with the modern computing world – perhaps they just recently got a handle on how to use e-mail – are discovering that there’s video that has interest to them on the internet. And there’s one singular concept that these people identify with this video on the internet… “this YouTube thing I’ve been hearing about.” YouTube is the entry point to interactive content for (potentially) billions of consumers.

So why, then, is it good that everyone identifies YouTube with internet video? How could that possibly benefit other players, big and small?

As YouTube has so graciously done ever since their budget became flush with Google dollar$$$, they are doing all the costly and difficult work to lay infrastructure that delivers internet video to the masses, so that nobody else has to. Of course, the decision to launch “Screening Room” was made with the idea of creating a new advertising and distribution model within the existing YouTube service, and certainly not to directly benefit millions of content creators, publishers, media companies, advertising agencies, sponsors, and video technology services. Which it will.

People aren’t quite ready to watch high quality video off their computer at this moment, both in a lack of owning the proper electronic components to allow internet content to replicate the television experience, and simply a lack of general acceptance of internet television as a construct. This is why YouTube is going to have trouble making money off “Screening Room” in the first few quarters of its existence. The attraction of exciting, creative content from notable artists is a huge benefit that’s sure to attract a decent number of eyeballs, but YouTube has to be weary of the very same proposition made by myriad players like SuperDeluxe, Funny or Die, Clark and Michael, etc. While the aforementioned don’t happen to be called YouTube, and thereby don’t have tens of millions in daily traffic, the lesson learned is still the same: there may be viewers watching this stuff, but that doesn’t mean the advertisers are ready to jump right in. Likewise, the most viewed videos each day are rarely related in any way to “big media,” which is also very telling of the growth necessary before internet television becomes a reality.

Here’s the bottom line: whether or not “Screening Room” is financially successful, it’s going to help build extraordinarily important mental architecture in the collective consciousness. Namely, more people will understand that there is quality video on the internet.

Plentitube fits perfectly into the category of businesses that can only stand to benefit from YouTube doing all the hard work bringing in a wider audience to internet video. We aren’t hosting video nor delivering advertisement in video. Those are 2 motherload verticals within the internet video industry that are experiencing explosive growth and will continue to do so for the next few years at least. Nobody can predict how either of those needs will be met, which companies will come out on top, and how they will deliver the videos and ads, respectively. Right now, YouTube is sitting squarely on top of the opportunity in both video and ad delivery. And they’re apparently using that $1 million a day budget to keep growing the opportunity. Whether or not they will be able to truly cash in off all that opportunity they’re building is unclear.

But I can guarantee you that a lot of very smart people with focused, pioneering new internet video products and services will. Because no longer is “if you build it they will come” the internet video mantra.

Google is building the baseball field and hoping to someday sell expensive tickets to the games. Whereas the opportunity in interactive media revenue isn’t simply limited to the baseball game.

There’s going to be a lot of people selling lemonade on the road to the ballpark.

~ by plentitube on June 19, 2008.