12 January 2007 - 21:02YouTube used for storage and distribution of videos

I was reading this article on the Presentation Zen blog and I started thinking about a site for video presentations. I cam to the conclusion that you could piggy-back on the current video infrastructure for storing and distributing your videos. YouTube and, even more, Google Video, exhibit very basic functionality (video storage and distribution) that can be refined into a higher-value service. For example you could put up a catalog of movie clips of Drama and Film students in Bucharest on YouTube and create a site that manages their portofolios while piggy-backing on YouTube’s distribution network. Doing so basically delegates infrastructure concerns to a third party that is dedicated to this task while you could focus on the value-adding aspects (marketing, etc…).
When YouTube got launched some saw it as a channel to distribute and promote small producers. Well, this is pretty hard to do, mainly because YouTube’s real estate is very small, which makes it very expensive. A few small-timers will get noticed, but just a very few. Once the big channels (NBC, CBS, etc…) see YouTube as a channel of content distribution expect them to price out of this channel pretty much everybody under a certain size. It would make a lot more sense to create niche sites that use YouTube’s infrastructure for targetting small audiences, I think that this would be a far better channel for exposing content. While the niche sites would delegate infrastructure concerns to YouTube YouTube could delegate content management to the niche sites, they would be far better suited for this.
YouTube’s functionality is mostly skewed to Web2.0/social networking concerns. I think that this incredible infrastructure put together by the engineering team at YouTube gets put to such a pointed (and possibly to a short-lived) use. It is like using blueberries only for making blueberry pancakes, and forgetting about the rest. YouTube could turn into the future repository for video content, but for this they should change the way they do business, starting with their terms of service. Indeed, it is possible that what we understand today by YouTube, namely its infrastructure + its social networking functionality will be a small division within a greater YouTube whose primary business is hosting video content. We will see into what YouTube will evolve, once again I think that they seriously minimize their potential by exploiting only one type of functionality related to video content.
P.S. This post didn’t cover the - some say - troublesome issues with YouTube’s terms of service.
P.P.S. This post also falls in the category of posts written on the run, sorry if I didn’t go deeper into some issues. I was pretty serious about the idea of hosting videos for Drama students in Romania on Youtube and marketing them on a different site which uses YouTube for storage, I didn’t have time to explore it.
Later edit: It would be possible for YouTube to include some sponsored links in search results ( similar to AdSense) in order to advertise small video producers similar to the way AdSense is advertising small businesses. In this way YouTube’s real estate (space on its web-pages) would grow to the point where the price for getting on this real estate would drop, therefore lowering the barrier of entry for small producers.
Later edit 2: By piggy-backing over YouTube’s infrastructure I meant embedding their movies in web-pages/IFrames/DIVs/etc… by copy-and-pasting the “Embed” textbox. The embedded YouTube component is not really meant to be used widely, primarily because it cannot be customized easily, which limits its use on outside sites.
Later edit 3: According to this article YouTube started making its content available thru third-parties, Verizon and Vodafone. It is a good start for diversifying its functionality, YouTube will basically handle the infrastructure concerns while its partners will focus on managing the content. I think that they could establish a lot more partnerships like this.
Later edit 4: Any interaction with outside systems should be hidden behind an abstraction layer (this is so obvious that I didn`t include it here). One side effect of this would be the fact that you could deploy your videos on various video hosting platforms (youtube, google video, vimeo, trilulilu.ro) and then use the appropriate platform suited to your video. One example that I thought about is hosting videos on trilulilu.ro for Romanian users (which do no want to pay higher fees for intensive network traffic with the Western world) and the same videos on youtube for Western users.