there's clearly been loads of talk around the Google/You Tube deal and Faris offers up a number of possible scenarios in terms of strategic directions. the tagging view is one which interests me especially. what is interesting is the huge numbers of people viewing clips and the gradual shift towards clip culture over full length programming. personally i rarely have time for a full hit of tv/video programming, just give me a decent snack sized portion or a short high quality dose of entertainment or bit of factual and make it easy for me to find stuff that i'm into. and give it to me on my mac over the tv. so for me YouTube is already more interesting than TV. i ran some focus groups for O2 a while back looking at some concepts for sport fans. at the end of one group, one of the respondents sent me this dennis bergkamp clip via bluetooth totally blowing the idea of paid for content out of the water (which we'd been discussing). i'm an arsenal fan, a season ticket holder so i posted it to YouTube and it's had 6,500 views based on a couple of key tagged words. i find that bonkers. but brilliant. there's a lot of talk about legal copyright issues and court cases. but let's not forget the vast number of users who ultimately will be the reason why deals will be done. so in the words of a leading LA based music attorney who i had the pleasure of meeting in a recent workshop "we've just got to figure out how to monetise the energy" i reckon there's a t-shirt in that.
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