Nora the piano-playing cat is no longer the main attraction as other programming comes on YouTube.
Since watching YouTube’s Entertainment Matters keynote at the Consumer
Electronics Show in January, I’ve spent more and more time pondering YouTube.
And YouTube has been giving me more and more to ponder, as the site is moving
away from Nora the Piano Cat and distraught Britney Spears fans to more ambitious
content.
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that YouTube is getting ready to
burn down the filmed entertainment business as we know it. In fact, the match has
already been struck. We just haven’t felt the heat yet.
There’s been a lot of talk about targeted advertising and how that builds revenue
streams from YouTube, which reassures content producers and owners that there
will be a way to make money off Web video even as audiences splinter to
infinitessimal shards. That’s fine, but I think that talk assumes we’ll be watching the
same things, just watching them through YouTube instead of cable or broadcast.
But how people watch shapes what they watch. As people shift to watching YouTube
and other Web video services, longform video could become a niche product, just as
opera and classical music became niche products in a market dominated by pop
songs.