The YouTube Chronicles—Your Future is 16:9

Answer: 15 hours of content every minute.

Question: How much video goes up on YouTube, on average? That’s 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And this upload rate might actually increase.

But what does that number mean for you or your organization? If you have a say in your college or university’s video effort, isn’t YouTube just a social-networking site, far more appropriate for undergrads sharing their clips with friends (and possibly running the risk of bad-taste-by-association)?

That’s an outdated view. The future of online video standards will be driven by YouTube, and will stay that way for a while.

Why? For many really good and specific reasons, most centered on money. Leaving commerce aside for a while, from the tech side the main reason may be the most important: YouTube is a division of Google. And Google’s aim is to offer browser-based one-stop solutions for a variety of applications, from search (of course), to software (Google Docs, anyone?), to… high-quality, high-definition video hosting and distribution.

I had a chance to sit in on the “What’s Next?: The Digital Distribution Imperative” workshop at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and YouTube’s director of content partnerships, Jordan Hoffner, brought the collected filmmakers to attention by formally announcing a few things that YouTube now does:

- YouTube offers full-HD capabilities, both for uploaded files and for clip playback. Users still have the option of viewing clips in normal quality, but HD likely will be the standard moving ahead.

- They’ve switched over to a standard 16:9 player, even for older clips recorded in 4:3 format. As this change sinks in with web teams of all types, this has implications ranging from web design, to video-player specification, to actual video production. Why plan on a 4:3 look and feel when the standard has changed?

- They’re going long-form. The old 10-minute limit has fallen by the wayside as YouTube recently soft-launched its feature-length channel, at http://www.youtube.com/movies.

I encourage you to visit, because this also means YouTube isn’t battling the film and television studios over copyrighted material anymore. It in fact has entered commercial partnerships with the BBC, CBS, Discovery, HBO, Lionsgate, MGM, PBS, Sony… and those were just the deals announced through January.

Did I mention the feature films available are free? It can a VERY mixed bag of quality, but a quick scan revealed “Koyaanisqatsi,” Richard Linklater’s “Slacker”, the 1967 “Casino Royale” directed by John Huston, “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, and a personal favorite, “Drugstore Cowboy” from Gus Van Sant.

All for free, and streaming to my browser just fine.

It’s this last point that is most significant for the rest of us.

The studios WANT you to watch these films, documentaries, TV episodes, and other available content, through YouTube. There are a lot of different ways they’ll make money from this… but to make money, all these parties are working to make sure you have the best, most consistent and most reliable viewing experience possible. YouTube is making sure its server ranches, its pipelines going in and coming out, and its featured “revenue-possible” content are of the highest quality possible.

That benefits everyone who watches content on YouTube, everyone who posts content to YouTube… and of course, everyone who uses YouTube as their media server of choice or default, such as colleges or universities that upload clips there, then bring them back into their own sites for display on their own web pages, viewable in as high quality as our largest tech and media companies can provide.

And that is a topic for further discussion.

Posted by James B. Hyatt
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Big Pipes, Small Screens and Great Stories

What kind of content works best on broadband platforms? What content is well-suited for the web and even the very-small screens of cells phones? Any ideas? Anyone?

It’s a question a lot of smart people are grappling with, including programmers, artists, producers… and participants in the "Web Content – Where are the Big Ideas for Small Screens?" panel discussion Jan. 19 at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Coming out of the discussion, the consistent and oddly-reassuring answer is good content—the kind that deals with personal experiences and passions, told in a compelling way that also makes people want to take action.

And why, exactly, would THAT tall order be considered a reassuring answer, when it immediately begs so many questions (especially in the context of a college or university’s web presence)? The short answer is because it’s easier to tackle this question of good, compelling content than it is to resolve the questions centering on how best to record and deliver your content, and how to effectively stay on top of a rapidly changing tech arena notorious for trashing effective solutions in favor of the new.

Panelists in the discussion, moderated by the American Film Institute’s Suzanne Stefanac, came from feature-length film and documentary backgrounds, but there was no common ground, no consensus in terms of how they produced their (far shorter) pieces. Example: some panelists shoot using 16:9 ratios, others stay with 4:3, but no one disagreed with anyone else’s methods. A few of the panelists shoot on professional-quality HD cameras and then "degrade" their content until it looks good when played back on a cell phone screen. Others do just the opposite: since the content will live on tiny screens, they use cellphones or palm-sized video cameras to record their footage, and edit as needed. Combining these approaches worked for others, and there was a healthy use of still photos, manipulated to convey movement or to establish key points.

What the panelists agreed on is that the technologies and methods for producing broadband content can vary wildly, change often, and will likely do so for quite a while—but what will never change is that good, compelling stories will find audiences. That’s been true since firelight flickered across the first cave paintings, and it will continue to be true as we watch flickering images on the newest, shiniest, and smallest of screens.

Posted by James B. Hyatt
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