Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The tube is still where you go for sitcoms, soaps, sports and the evening news, but for amateur video or vintage bloopers, not to mention some copyrighted clips, at least until the copyright holder complains, YouTube is where you want to be. This video sharing site has an estimated 12½ million monthly visitors, making it one of the top 30 sites on the Web, an unquestionable, if still money-losing, breakout success. Michelle Quinn wrote about it this week for the San Jose Mercury News. Michelle, welcome to OTM.
MICHELLE QUINN: Hi, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: First of all, what kind of generalizations can you make about the content? I mean, is this mostly "America's Funniest Home Video" quality? Is it mostly pirated TV and film? Is it mostly ads or archival material? Has it become smutty or violent?
MICHELLE QUINN: I think that you hit some of their main categories there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
MICHELLE QUINN: There's one video, really popular last week, of a poor kid named Edgar falling down. It had like a million views, and I thought – [OVERTALK]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
MICHELLE QUINN: - it was completely appalling. People tell me all the time that they go on there to see old "Simpsons" shows or old "South Park," or something that they missed a week ago or 10 years ago. But if you spend some time there, you'll start to see video responses to videos. So there are people creating little mini-dramas about their lives. So here I am taking my Prozac.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
MICHELLE QUINN: And then here I am, you know, petting my cat. In one case that I found amazing, there was a guy who'd wear a mask and would do magic tricks, and he had a huge following. And one of YouTube's competitors signed him away, just like a ball club. You know, here's a guy in his living room, and they took him away.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
MICHELLE QUINN: He did a "Goodbye, YouTube" video, and now you can find him on another site called revver.com.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you find that somewhat bewildering, that, you know, people who say, now I'm taking my Prozac, now I'm petting my cat, now I'm brushing my teeth, can actually assemble an audience? I mean, there's something sort of Warholian [LAUGHING] about these kinds of films.
MICHELLE QUINN: It's kind of intriguing, the simple things in life being highlighted for a day. Like there's one woman who has a bite of ice cream and has a brain freeze, and so you get to see her face contort.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
MICHELLE QUINN: I forgot how painful a [LAUGHING] brain freeze is, but here I got to see it and relive it again from this woman. It is a new art form, in a way, of people documenting their lives in ways that haven't been done before.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And people are posting, what, about 35,000 videos a day on YouTube?
MICHELLE QUINN: Yup. I think the new number is more than 40,000 videos are being posted a day.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: For a long time, there's been a lot of video on the Internet. How does YouTube change the equation?
MICHELLE QUINN: YouTube came up with three breakthroughs. One is they let you watch the video on Flash, which is a software program that easily compresses the video and then expands it when you want to watch it. So that made it easy for people to upload and watch a video.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: These are people who used to have to deal with issues of compatibility and dueling media players and so on before then?
MICHELLE QUINN: You've got it exactly right. Two other things. Media playback, and the third thing was that you can take the video and put it on a webpage. So these three things happened. But the other big thing that happened was a lot of people in the U.S. have high-speed Internet, and taking videos and watching video has really increased. So all these things happened roughly at the same time, and YouTube was there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Microsoft had conducted a study that found – and maybe we should consider [LAUGHING] the source – but it found that 40 percent of U.S. cable TV subscribers are unhappy with their current service because it lacks variety of content and features. And as a result, more and more people are planning their evening viewing through their mouse rather than through their remote. Do you think that's why YouTube is doing so well?
MICHELLE QUINN: Well, of course, we can't necessarily trust the Microsoft survey. It does seem right, from what I know from people in my life. They complain about their cable service all the time. And I can see a day where you have a little searcher out there on the Internet who will gather for you a nighttime of entertainment that might include four short videos that are funny, you know, some longer videos and maybe a series that you like to watch. Maybe we're not too far off from it, where the TV and the PC really merge as the same thing. You know, it's funny. When I talk to people who are under 24, maybe they're in college, and they said, we don't even watch TV in college, because everybody has a laptop. So I think that for a younger generation, they're going to demand it more.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But as broadcast television begins to offer more and more of its shows on demand via the Internet, will YouTube be able to get a piece of that action?
MICHELLE QUINN: As they tell me, they're talking to every studio, almost every music company. They are talking to major retail advertisers. They see a role for themselves. But I don't really know how it's going to work with companies like NBC, CBS. You know, they might decide to put a tease on YouTube and then drive the traffic back to NBC's website or CBS's website. So that's the kind of thing, my guess is, what's going to happen. YouTube sort of created this extra public space, where you watch short video, that hadn't been there before. And if you're a smart content company, you want to be in that space, even if it is to try to bring people back to where you are.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Michelle, thank you very much.
MICHELLE QUINN: Thank you, Brooke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michelle Quinn is a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, the lousy journalism that united a nation – ours.