Charbax Blog

Chad Hurley says they have automatic DMCA systems, or user-generated automatic moderation. Does that mean they have analog and digital fingerprinting filters on uploaded content? Do they provide content owners to scan their content and submit those analog and digital fingerprints? Does Youtube let content owners automatically “take-over” the content onto their own Youtube account when someone else uploads it?

The worst thing I think with regards to content owners being still legitimally angry at Youtube, is that Youtube still doesn’t monetize the views as it should, so all these billions of views of copyrighted material isn’t directly monetized, basically it’s bad for content owners and bad for Youtube as well in terms of paying for bandwidth and infrastructure. Although some say content owners can monetize their content indirectly (stuff like when people watch your music video or your concert video on Youtube, more people buy your CD) and some people say it doesn’t matter that Google is loosing millions of dollars on paying for the bandwidth and infrastructure required to deliver 40 thousand terrabytes of bandwidth per month currently, including the infrastructure required to encoding of 1000 minutes of video every minute, host it and process it in different ways.

I didn’t like Flash based videos when Youtube started, I still don’t like it. But the popularity and ease of use of the Youtube experience is impressive. Still though, I think it’s much too hard to really get meaningful experiences on Youtube, the personalized video recommendations engine isn’t very good so far, the quality is still so low and the incentive from content producers is still very limited cause the monetization is not very effective.

Google is the coolest company out there, but I think they are still too slow at releasing new features. It’s been over a year and a half since Google aquired Youtube, and still nothing much seem to have happened other then perhaps that there is a better more reliable infrastructure behind it, view count and audience is growing, fancy statistics for the content providers, that’s still no difference from the users point of view and especially I would say it could be said to be disappointing from the content providers point of view.

Chad Hurley says he is proud that there are some college kids that are earning thousands of dollars each month posting videos to Youtube, that some people get record contracts or get hired on TV because of being discovered on Youtube. That’s all fine and well, I wouldn’t have the exact monetization statistics, but I don’t think there are more then a few tens perhaps a few hundreds of independent content providers that are able to make money on Youtube thus far. Monetization of Youtube with banner ads next to the video is not much better then traditional adsense, you need millions of hits to start making a few hundreds dollars a month. Once Youtube has activated automatic overlay advertising, the monetization rates should grow 10x or 100x in terms of monetization per 1000 views. This will lead to tens of thousands of college kids being able to make a living being creative with their video publishing on Youtube. So really, Youtube needs to increase the impact from monetization 1000 times.

I posted this as a comment at newteevee.com

I think that TV stations are going to be replaced by Internet TV next year, cause there will be $100 VOD set-top-boxes available to bring On-Demand Internet video to the HDTV. People also spend a lot of time in public transportation, there you can use a 4″ screen to watch your personalised Internet video content.

Soon enough, I don’t think that content providers will need to spend the time to create a brand, and I think RSS will be replaced by somekind of personal recommendations engine. The point is, you may “subscribe” to your favorite content providers on the Internet, but I think that even more important will be the possibillity of a generator to provide you with a personalised feed based on Ratings that you do compared to all the ratings from the community.

Today starring items on Google Reader I think is kind of useless, and I think Google Reader should have something better than only bringing friends feeds in. It should bring in feeds from all other Google Reader users based on the starring of content.

Then imagine you will be able to sit back at your 60″ HDTV and click a big green button on the remote control, which will launch a customized tv programme that the system knows you will enjoy, or you may just choose one of the “moods” of the content, such as if you are in the mood to watch something to do with Tech you can click the green button in that mode, or if you want something about politics in a certain region you can also get to view that, personalised for you.

I don’t think that people want to watch ads on the Internet, I think many people will prefer to pay 0.01$ or whatever to cover bandwidth costs and to pay the content provider. I’d rather pay Google $2 a year to not have them show me ads on search and in my gmail account, who would prefer to have to watch all those ads?

I posted this at http://scobleizer.com/2007/12/24/the-future-of-tv-at-leweb3/#comment-1786294

first posted in this group.

There shouldn’t be ratings, cause the “Popular videos” area is allready all about some funny videos which many many people view and download.

The thing Google needs to implement is a way that you Digg videos so  that Google can make a personalized list of free and payable videos which Google has figured out is exactly of your taste.. Some system like http://last.fm and http://linkedfeed.com

Somehow people should be able to upload their videos to Google, they get processed also with voice-recognition so Google know all the words that are said in the video, so the video transcripts are searchable. And it should be so that people do not need to think about marketing and promoting their video! If it is a good video, then the public should be watching and downloading it automatically!

And I would like to offer all my videos for free, but it would be great if Google could enable people to donate money through Google Wallet to support me. Artists should have their artists page like a video blog, where all of their videos are displayed, be able to setup future projects pitches where any Google user can invest whatever the amount they want and they become thus micro-investor in the artists future
production. Something like 50/50 of the revenue of the completed production would go to the artist and to all the micro-investors. Where the micro-investors though get a smaller and smaller share of the revenue the more people download it, pay for it and donate for it later.

Just like the “my starred topics” of Google groups (this place here where we are debating). I don’t think there will be ratings of 1-10 like imdb nor 1-5 or anything like that. There will be your starred videos and your unstared videos.

Let’s for example say there is video A B C D E F

you watch and you put a star next to video A B C

I watch and put a star next to B C D

then Google will tell you “You should probably check out video D” and it will tell me “You should probably check out video A”..

This is basic quality/recommendation personalized system. I think Google will go for something like that, though there will always be somekind of “Popular” listing also, like simply taking the globally most popular or most starred videos.

I think when this quality/recommendations system will be integrated, it might be that we will want to sit for hours and we will keep discovering more and more shows that fit exactly our taste.. It will be fascinating.

The place for comments will be the video blogs. Google will probably combine their blogger system with Google Video system. So you will very simply automatically have a blog, and you can, as the content provider, choose if you want comments enabled or not, and you might even have some comments moderations tools if you want..

For donations to be a successfull model, I think it is important that the content provider has to accept to show publicly exactly how much donations has been received yet compared to how many people have downloaded the video. So that an artist who makes alot of quality content and does not reveice donations, that the visitor will think “ah, that’s unfair, I want to support this artist”. Or the opposite could work also “ah, this video is not worth that much donations, I’ll skip doing as so many others have allready done, unless I see this artist can really produce more and better content”.

It will be a big thing with users subscribing to artists video RSS feeds. So everytime you see some video you really like you can stay in touch with the source. Firstly by easilly being able to send a message to the artist for example “hey I really like your video” to the more dedicated approach of going to ones Gbuy account and spending a dollar or two on eigther donating or on investing in a specific project that the artist has listed on his page.

You can limit abuse on investors money being used for other purpose is that the artist can be held accounted for. An artist has built up his fanbase of trusted micro-investors. By firstly releasing cheaply produced content and steadilly making better and better content, to the point where there are enough investors giving a dollar each to a certain project so the artist has reached the specific goal of for example 1000€ or something like that, that would be the cost to for example pay a couple of actors and getting some lighting and sound equipment for a few days. And just like small stocks on the stock market, they have to prove with results that they can make money, the artist will have to prove that he can continue making quality content and that more and more people download his videos.