SHOW AND SHARE
It's great to see YouTube pro-actively trying to build the definitive content store of music videos, as described in the BBC article. As the article states:
"Video sharing website YouTube is in talks with record labels about offering current and archive music videos"
The ambition is almost Googlesque in it's scope:
"YouTube co-founder Steve Chen told Reuters news agency it was hoped that within 18 months the site would "have every music video ever created".
The company said it planned to offer the videos free of charge."
If accomplished, this would mark some good progress towards filling the "content video vacuum" I spoke of a few days ago, created by:
"...the relative lack of a wide, deep, affordable, and fast-growing inventory of video content from the traditional media companies.
It's a vacuum created by the defensive mind-set adopted by the mainstream media industry."
What'd be particularly cool is if YouTube were able to negotiate, design and execute features that would let their users create play-lists of the videos, that could be shared, morphed and re-shared on the service.
This doesn't necessarily mean copying the videos to a portable device, although that would be a worthy feature, but just able to be "socially" leveraged by the user base.
It's something that already exists in a basic form for regular music tracks on Apple's iTunes, but could be significantly enhanced in a video form.
Of course links to easily buy the tracks either in audio and/or video form would offer an obvious path to win/win monetization for all parties.
All in all, a worthy ambition, and a good first step towards leveraging old content anew.
It's interesting that MTV, which just celebrated it's 25th birthday, pioneered the SHOWING of videos to mainstream audiences via the then new and disruptive cable industry, which was emerging as a nascent distribution force in the world of television.
It's appropriate that YouTube tries and takes it to the next level, towards hopefully the SHARING of videos by mainstream audiences, via the new and disruptive broadband internet, a quarter century later.
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