I love YouTube, but there's something you need to understand: YouTube just stomps around, recklessly murdering innocent bystanders. The latest casualties?
Joe Liberman's Political Career
Slate documents Lamont's ascendancy at Joe Liberman's expense, and what does John Dickerson name as the weapon of assassination? YouTube viral videos.
The Lamont videos were far more effective than tendentious blog posts, and they gave energetic supporters an outlet for their energies (a person can only pound so many yard signs). What's more, the videos offered a regular dose of entertainment to supporters who were interested but not obsessed.
Check out the Slate piece for a Top 5 list of anti-Joementum clips.
Windows Media Video
By dangling the DRM carrot in front of the legacy studios in music and movies, Microsoft was able to buy some content protected in Windows Media format. And by making Windows Movie Maker as good or better than iMovie, they were starting to get a foothold in content created by regular people. But YouTube doesn't convert Windows Media to work with its Flash player due to Microsoft's onerous restrictions, so you can't upload your Movie Maker clips to YouTube. (Naturally, Movie Maker won't output .mov or any other widely-usable formats.) Note to Microsoft: Community trumps codecs. Users see "I can't upload my Movie Maker clips to YouTube" as your bug, not theirs, and they don't want to hear about "transcoding licensing fees" just to watch funny videos.
Even if Microsoft makes it free for services to convert Windows Media Video to .flv for embedding in a Flash player (which won't happen), most of these services are running all their servers on Linux. They're not going to introduce Windows boxes into the mix just for this feature, because they're a huge additional management hassle.
My Free Time
TubeRaider alone has hours and hours of videos I could watch, if only I had the time. I consider it only fair cosmic retribution that it's costing them a bundle as well. Long live YouTube, serial killer.
Some graphs on the YouTube Lieberman post.
http://infofilter.net/blog/archives/2006/08/you_tube_politi.html
Duh, duh, duh...another one bites the dust. Atom is going over to Viacom (lets hope it gets a much needed facelift and re-launch). In the meantime, then there were the big 5: You Tube, Apple, MSFT, Google Video, Yahoo Video to duke it out.
Do you know how YouTube actually converts these files into .flv on the fly?