Nixta Sinks

Just the other day I was going to write a post about how YouTube.com could single-handedly bring music videos back to life, having spent the morning watching them on the site and wondering why the usually restrictive music industry hadn't pulled them all. Indeed, why hadn't Comedy Central pulled all the Daily Show clips? Common sense. Simple common sense.

I haven't read the article that beat me to the punch of course, but here it is.

Update:
Anyway, as I was saying...

I was very sceptical of YouTube at first (as I am, unreasonably, of most things). It seemed something else that Dr. R could spend two minutes extracting 5 hours worth of entertainment from, watching ducks drive cars, Hungarian Hamster Hamlet, a claymation interpretation of Derek And Clive's Joan Crawford sketch (naval fleets and all) or the real-life sewing of the very first DQM Bacon, whereas I would spend 5 frustrating hours looking for tits on a bicycle and end up seeing public school-boys throwing themselves off Devil's Dyke and a man playing Queen on spokes and somehow end up in gaol for accidentally downloading 5 shaky and wind-noisy seconds of an eight-year-old girl learning to ride her brand-new tricycle on her birthday to mum and dad's enormous glee.

In fact, I found that there was little worth viewing that I could get my mitts on. I'd sit back and calmly watch the clock on the mantlepiece to determine if I could actually make out the minute-hand moving while The Doc found the next great thing and posted it for us all to see. I'd pull the pipe from my mouth and catch up via the Rufilter.

Then I left the internet behind and went to Italy for a month, taking my wife and myself on a wonderful month-long tour of Italy, Sicily, Croatia and Slovenia. In the arse-end of Italy (that's the South, which I never believed could be as bad as Italians said, but which surpassed (or souspassed, or underpassed) their most acerbic declamanation) we watched music videos as much as a novelty as a means of distracting ourselves from suicide, but I've already written about that.

And this brings me (in my usual long-winder roundabout manner) to my point. I couldn't have written about that rather fantastic Yuki video without YouTube. I'd say it was an epiphany, but that would make me puke. It opened my eyes to my ageing misery and old fartness. As usual, 10 years too late, and for the wrong reasons, but once more I'd jumped on a bandwagon just as the wheels were being replaced with bricks and everyone was sitting around sipping coffee and reminiscing. I found that selfish urge which YouTube satisfied, and that finally gave me a reason to be grateful for its existence. I can't see beyond the end of my own nose. It's big, but not that big, I'm merely grossly egotistical and simple-minded. I feel 80 years old, but without a reason to deserve it.

JOY

Whatever. The important thing is that it led me to search for more Yuki videos. Nothing special. Nice and catchy. Good for a soundtrack. Hard to pin down, and perhaps part-way through a re-invention of forced-videos as she distances herself from Judy and Mary. What do you know though? It won best video. Anycrap, I finally got to see all the Gorillaz videos I'd never seen. These are things that you simply cannot get to see in America, and which I consequently missed out on. They talk about the demise of the music video, but really they've brought it about themselves and it makes me sick. Sick to my commie core. Which led me to watch hours of Back In Black. Do it.

And I realised that something interesting was going on. Where ABC and NBC were pulling YouTube clips of their current-affairs shows and so forth, Comedy Central and others were turning a blind-eye and allowing these clips to air. And suddenly it struck me. Why not? There's no reason not to. These are small clips at best aired three times and once for a highlight show at the end of the year if they're very lucky. No, JB, it's not like a full-length movie that cost millions to make and in the keeping-unfree of which the creators have a very real interest in.

And for that, thank you YouTube, but make sure you stay alive. Even today, in the comments section of a Gizmodo post on a treadmill-bike, buried in the dimwittery was notice that nerds failed to function if YouTube passed away even temporarily, a discussion I had in brief a couple of weeks ago with old Hedgey. I doubt if anything has become so important (indispensable perhaps) to so many in such a short space of time. Other sites share in the internet video-on-demand phenomenon, but I'm going to focus on YouTube. No reason. No excuse. I just don't know enough about the others, but the position YouTube finds itself in is precarious, yet at the same time doubtless entirely safe. It cannot fail. There is simply too much demand for it, and so whether anyone can afford to buy it out or not to keep it afloat when its VC has been spent (has that happened yet?), it will be bought and will be kept aloft at great expense.

Quite interesting market dynamics, I think. Who will it be? And what effect will it have on the distribution of bandwidth demand, and so what effect will it have on the physical and pricing architecture of the internet? Possibly none. Possibly the consumer will pay more. Or maybe YouTubes bills will just keep climbing, but surely that can't be sustained.