Viddling Around™

I don’t know what she’d say about the current web video explosion in this context, but I think she and I would agree that with 170+ video sharing sites out there, sharing videos over the web is not a business, but is really only a a feature.
Years ago — sometime around 1990/1991, Esther Dyson was speaking at a “Multimedia industry” conference. For those of you who are old enough, remember that back in those days, there was a new Multimedia company starting every day, getting gobs of venture backing, and all of them got pages of coverage, all the while being darlings of the industry conferences dedicated to “Multimedia”. PC-CDROMs were all the rage, and to get your Windows box to play sound or a video, you had to purchase the “Multimedia Expansion Pack for Windows”.

Esther’s argument at one of these conferences struck me as profound. There *was* no “Multimedia industry”. Blasphemy - but brilliant. Esther’s point was that with SO many new companies, SO many new products, and the clamor to multimedia-enable every single piece of software and all the new PC’s, multimedia wasn’t a product, wasn’t a business, and certainly wasn’t an industry. It was merely a feature. In her vision, every system and every software product was going to have multimedia features in the not too distant future. And she was right. Within two years the nascent “industry” collapsed, yet multimedia features were a success, and drove new system and application sales.

I contend that with the mad rush to spawn new YouTube clones, we’re witnessing the same mis-step played out again. If you accept that the market even needs more than a couple of these, you quickly come to the same conclusion - that uploading and sharing videos isn’t a business model unto itself, advertising or no advertising. It’s just something that should be available at all the relevant sites we visit or use. Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t value in providing an index, or intelligent guides to the video that is out there… but that very different from the mechanics of sharing.
Don’t get me started on this same issue with regard to “social networking”…