I’ve been waiting for YouTube to finally figure out what business they belong in, and while watching a live broadcast from Ad Tech: San Francisco. I think they finally got a handle on it. The It in this case has to with offering up ”Channels” of content. Others have half-heartedly tried it but high-flying YouTube is the exact perfect right source to really make it happen in the right way and make it work on a long term basis. I only hope YouTube can continue to hold their focus and serve up timely and relevant video/visual content that the major boring mainstream media and netwoeks have totally overlooked or naively lack. Plus YouTube has such an incredible backlog of years worth of choice video that we are all so familiar with that needs to be packaged in new innovative ways. Call it a repurposing, mashups, whatever, it just makes sense. for YouTube and their viewers now and in the future.
4/15/11 Addendum: I just got wind that each day YouTube is bleeding $1.2 million in bandwidth costs. I have seen too many great services fail for the very same reason. So, we can hope and pray that YouTube finds their way out of this conundrum because so many people count on YouTube for content hosting and distribution. Interesting questions crop up.- How long can Google sustain YouTube’s burn? What happens if YouTube goes away? Who is out there to save, subsidize or acquire it? Is there anything they can do to reverse the trend at this point?