Moving pictures and still life
When it comes to some famous web 2.0 sites and services, it seems as though certain sites rule the roost. With 70% of video downloads from the net, the popular video clip site YouTube, may seem to be sitting pretty. But it isn’t, for three reasons.
On the one hand, there are dozens of other video sharing sites. There’s Google video, Yahoo video, AOL video, Veoh, ClipShack, Videobomb and (probably) a hundred others - sorry, too exhausting to provide links. Everyone wants a piece of the action. This may not make things as difficult for YouTube as it might appear, though. While some of their competitors are big companies, they don’t have user share or “social capital”. YouTube is the clear market leader and this brings with it a considerable competitive advantage. It’s a virtuous circle. The majority of users go to YouTube, so they attract the largest number of fresh contributions, the lifeblood of any such system. Aspiring film makers will gravitate towards the networks that give them the largest amount of recognition. Being the biggest is likely to mean that you have the best material, as well as the worst, but the systems YouTube have in place (favourites, votes and groups) make it easy to find the most entertaining and popular clips. Where it does make things hard is in the costs - Google and Yahoo (and probably AOL, no confirmation?) have their own server farms. YouTube doesn’t.