B. Mann Consulting

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at video online. Part of it has been technical, and part of it has been thinking about what is needed and where it is headed. I was involved with IPTV / video over IP back at Nortel, and a lot of things actually haven't changed.

As if video on the Internet wasn't hot enough already, the whole Google buys YouTube has upped the fever pitch to...well, something hotter than fever :P

So, for starters, go and read (and link to!) Kevin Marks' five point plan to save use from Flash video. He included "crappy" in the title, and he's right, but...well, it's what works today.

And that's what will stop us from getting any further. Getting stuck in the "works today" mindset is a bad thing. When you sit down to build something new, you're really never building it for today...you're building it for today AND for the next little while. Somebody has to take a chance on figuring out the future. 

In any case, I very much agree with all of Kevin's points. The phrase "detection script" makes me shiver a bit, and Flash is still the only platform solution if you want one integrated application that has interactivity built into it as well, but for straight up video, we can do better, and should be trying to.

Om Malik posted a great conversation starter entitled Attack of the You Tube Clones, talking about all the video sites that are out there now from the "majors".

AOL just announced Uncut Video, their own version of online video sharing ala You Tube. (Read Mashable’s take on it.) Niall Kennedy says that Yahoo is working on something similar as well, and said so in its analyst day meeting with the financial analysts. Niall says that “The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well.”

With Google Video and MySpace Video already up and running, I wonder what are the exits for companies like You Tube and other such services? Will someone buy YouTube for its traffic? What are your thoughts on this?

The bits of setting up a video sharing service are fairly simple. Or at least, the Web 2.0 tech platform for running a community website. Of course the Drupal framework can be used as one example (this story about Bryght in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix apparently quotes Roland as saying we'll build a clone of MySpace for $100K), but Ruby on Rails or any other decent web framework can be used to easily build web applications/community sites.