eLab’s Knowledge Repository

eLab – Video communities.ppt 

In the past 24 months, video sharing has become hugely popular. YouTube, one of the most popular online video community, launched in February 2005 and 5 months later had 3 million videos viewed each day. In April 2006, 35’000 new videos were uploaded daily and users watched 30 to 40 million clips everyday.

The top six video sites are YouTube, MSN Video, Yahoo Video, Google Video and iFilm. Together they gain twice as much traffic as the top six US broadcast networks websites.

These videos are usually short (YouTube set a 10 minutes limit for regular users) and targeted at friends and family. The proliferation of camera phones and cheap video editing tools boosted these amateur-shot videos, often quite strange or funny.

However these videos are not always self-made, as it is rather easy to capture a clip of a TV program on a hard disk video recorder and to upload it to a video-sharing site. YouTube and its competitors are trying to remove these clips that breach copyright, but traditional content providers begin to understand that there are big opportunities to promote their existing content using short videos. By making them available, they try to gain popularity for their programs (see viral video example). A report published by IDC predicts that online video could generate $ 1.7 B in revenues by 2010.

Although it is not very clear how YouTube will make money, there are already some hints for online video business models:

• iFilm offers free basic service supported by ads, as well as “premium” services featuring higher-resolution clips;

• besides amateur media and Internet videos, Google Video wants to distribute commercial professional media, such as televised content and movies;

• Revver auto-inserts advertisements directly into videos and shares revenue with the maker of the video.

There are many video services and companies and they do not only provide communities and sharing tools, there are also editing, formatting, or subtitling platforms:

• JumpCut and EyeSpot are online video editors where users can select and arrange video parts by dragging and dropping thumbnails, add music or sound effects, choose transitions, add titles, etc.

• VPod.tv allows users to upload any video formats, edit them online, and also publish them to different sites such as MySpace or eBay. Advertising is built into the system and content can be optimized for mobile phones, PSP, iPods, etc.

• dotSUB provides free browser based tools that allow anyone to translate films’ subtitles from one language into countless other languages.

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