Introduction
The value of youtube is in it's ability to acquire metadata via video browsing. They have zero interest in the video content itself.
The market, rather the norm, of navigating with online video (ovideo) will begin to increase.
The question on the markets/investors lips is why would anyone buy youtube. The traffic is high, but the market cant see the business model. Advertsing is risky because of the huge amount of copyright imnfringement.
This text is about the data trail that YouTube creates and leads the way in motion picture navigation (MPN)
Missing functionality
No Tag Clouds - forces user to move from clip to clip
Indexing
Usage and tagging (especially the ability to tag within the video) is of massive importance to the indexing companies (Google and Yahoo)
History of the founders
Founded in February 2005 in a garage by three twentysomething alums of eBay Inc.'s PayPal electronic-payment unit, YouTube quickly built a huge consumer following for videos online. http://www.moneyweb.co.za/shares/international_news/989367.htm
Steve and I started this company because we personally experienced how hard it was to share videos online. We were at a dinner party and we were taking photos and videos and the next day just had a really difficult time emailing these video clips to each other. So we thought this would be a great problem to help people deal with that online. http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/tuning-fork-166171.php
The seeds of YouTube's popularity stretch back to the origins of the company, and the founders' intention to make watching video on the Web as easy and infectious as possible. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11617588/site/newsweek/
Relationship with the broadcasters and networks
Hurley: We're building relationships with studios, networks, and labels because they're looking for ways to reach new audiences, and we have a great platform and a great stage to make that happen.
Visual navigation
Navigating through video rather than text is frankly just more fun. Based upon how users move from content to content leaves a data trail and thus begins to generate meaning of the relationship between the media clips. Just as Flickr works as a front end application to Yahoo!s core data business, tracking users interests during visits tells the indexing services how humans correlate data.
Advertising
Good short to medium term strategy - possibly just paying for the current bandwidth (100m playouts per day)
"There's a real question whether an advertising-based business model creates extra risk" for a company like YouTube, Fred von Lohmann says. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11617588/site/newsweek/page/2/
http://www.eff.org/about/staff/?f=fred_von_lohmann.html
Copyrighted material
Youtube dont own ANY of the content on the service. They own the analysis of metadata.
And this is the problem, the metadata isnt great…
Stats
http://www.computers.net/2006/08/youtube_stats_r.html
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115689298168048904-5wWyrSwyn6RfVfz9NwLk774VUWc_20070829.html?mod=rss_free
Staff
Gideon Yu
http://www.computers.net/2006/09/youtube_hires_i.html
Sequoia
backed yahoo and google - they undertand the data business
Tagging Time (The money shot)
Tagging moments in time Viddler
ESP project as example
MPEG 7
How does YouTube get to here:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-7
Emir Demo: http://www.semanticmetadata.net/demo/MDS_in_Emir.htm
http://frameline.tv/
Macromedia (Flash) and MPEG7?
Can QuickTime (Apple) step in
Youtube have all the original assets stored - thus the whole site can be transcoded (bearing in mind it's 9000 days of content, that's still less than the Broadcaster and Networks archive)
Research Links
YouTube hires away Yahoo's Gideon Yu
YouTube - The King of Video Sharing?
Interview with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/tuning-fork-166171.php
