YouTubing history

It’s 7:15 and my evening tea is going down particularly well to the tune of the E-tv news in the background. Yet another incident of teens beating each other up in school and getting a handy mate to record the whole ordeal via his camera-phone airs on the news. Then it hit me, I am watching the news reporting on news being recorded on a cell phone. The ramifications of such devices being around when John .F. Kennedy was assassinated boggles the mind, could some erstwhile amateur film maker with his camera phone have recorded live footage of the true killer? Who knows where history would have taken us had such tools been at our disposal eons ago. Or more importantly how will history be written today, with the world of recording historical events live takes flight.
Ok so back to my E-TV experience. Now why would kids be recording a school yard fight? Surely such triviality belongs in detention? However December 2005 came along and YouTube was born. YouTube has provided a platform for dribble such as these School Yard scuffles; however along with the dribble comes the golden key to burgeoning young film makers. YouTube allows users to upload videos that can be easily shared and accessed by anyone. About 35,000 videos are uploaded and 40 million are watched every day. That’s an incredible medium for talent scouts. The genius of YouTube is it’s unique rating system, the content is created exclusively by users and anyone can see how many times a video has been viewed. This allows users to virtually survey the cultural whims of our society at any given time. This gives the film industry a key hole view of what the public wants to see and hence an incredibly powerful marketing tool is born.
Aside from emerging markets, YouTube features your full length blockbusters online. Negating the need for a trip to the video store, that’s if you live in a speedy broadband community. According to a survey undertaken by comscore Video Metrix, internet users in the United States watched 11.5 billion videos in March 2008, yes that’s billion. That an average of 83 videos watched per viewer during March alone. Stagering figures and I am sure South Africa is hot on their heels.