Keeping an Eye on Technology Futures, No Hidden Agendas, New Attitudes, No Platitudes!
There's never been anything like YouTube in human history. It gets 4 billion page views a day, which adds up to a trillion a year. It has 800 million users (about the same as Facebook) who watch 3 billion hours of video a month (that's about 340,000 years).
People now generate massive quantities of video. Before YouTube there was no central place where all that could be placed. But now most of it comes to a central location where people can wallow in it endlessly.
It's clear that TV is the competition. But YouTube isn't like television. People can't just turn YouTube on and chill out the way they do with TV. So, while the average American spends nearly 3 hours a day watching TV, the average user spends only about 15 minutes on Youtube per day.
When you turn on a TV, you're presented with a limited number of options, which you know something about and which you can count on to be fairly professional-looking. On YouTube, the search engine is sifting through a billion options, literally, and you hardly know anything about any of them.
The consequence of YouTube's runaway success is that it costs Google (which bought Youtube in 2006) a lot of money to keep the billion-eyed beast alive. It has to keep a lot of servers humming to store all that video, because it needs big, fat expensive pipes to keep those videos streaming non-stop.
YouTube now hosts more than 500,000 educational videos, on a huge variety of topics. The new mobile-friendly iTunes U also offers 500,000 educational resources, with 60% of the viewership from outside the US. This global consumption of U.S.-created online educational content may be part of a radical transformation of global education.
In the meantime, conventional TV (with constant commercial interruptions) is dying. Movies and TV programs are available via AppleTV and GoogleTV and Amazon, whenever you're ready, at a minimal pay-per-view. These days, that's the only way I watch TV.
