I just heard some of the numbers on YouTube from Ken Rutkowski. They are utterly amazing when you think about them – but I have to say that I was predicting this kind of growth several years ago. Still not as big in Australia as in the US, but once the NBN is up and running – watch out – there is going to be so much video in Australia it will be scary.

And at that time – watch out, broadcast TV and Foxtel. This disruption is coming your way, soon. And by the way, at that time what will be interesting is that it appears that YouTube will have fully integrated ads into their offering.

So what will the content industry look like at that time?

I would figure that the word of mouth about content will just go totally over the top. Things will get extremely viral, extremely fast. As a result, in the event that content is not released day and date to all available media in all territories, what will happen is that there will be a tremendous upsurge in demand by people for content that is “hot”. That will mean a massive uplift in non-legal downloads (I am going to call them non-legal rather than pirate, because I believe that there needs to be a distinction made between actions that are based on profit and actions that are made relating to getting something at a marginal cost to the consumer without any profit motive).

This in turn will mean that there will be a continued demand for storage devices and for bandwidth and for those little media gateway devices that they sell at Hardly Normal for $149 that enable you to view content of pretty much every file type on your TV (and for $199 you can get a device that enables you to play HD content).

So at this point we might consider how people are going to communicate with each other the fact that there is a piece of new hot content and where it is. We already have places like Pirate Bay that point at movies, whether they are legal or illegal.

It seems pretty obvious that there has to be an app for Face Book that will accelerate the virality of a video by making it pop up on multiple degrees of separation of friends. Now I realize that there are apps that essentially do this. But I am thinking about what you might do that is going to push the content at you in a much more visceral way.

I would be interested in hearing from anyone who is working in this area and can share what they are doing with me… preferably not via the comments section. You know where to reach me.

Here are the key data points from Ken Rutkowski about video in the US.

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Posted in Main Page by Chris Gilbey No Comments Yet