Over at NewTeeVee, there’s an interesting post about how YouTube did it. How Chad Hurley and Steve Chen made millions billions and became a mega-success with Internet video. I mean, didn’t everyone have that same idea?

Apparently Hurley spoke at an event in Silicon Valley last week and NewTeeVee recorded the entire thing on video. (Ironically, they couldn’t post the video on YouTube because it was too long, so it’s being hosted on Blip.tv.)

When Hurley and Chen made the rounds among VCs, they didn’t use PowerPoint slides. (How’s that for a breath of fresh air.) Their pitch consisted of actual product and statistics. You’d think the pitch would be very straightforward:

1. User-generated content is growing.
2. Videos are growing in popularity and are easier to use than ever.
3. Allow people to post their user generated videos
4. Mix it with social media.

Add a clever name and marketing and … Bam!

So why did YouTube succeed? I believe they had the same idea everyone had, but the main difference was in execution. YouTube made it easier than any one else and made sharing videos fun.

Another big issue, according to Hurley, was the self-policing nature of YouTube. Says NewTeeVee:

One of first companies to automate DMCA — the press misses this, according to Hurley — one of various examples of solutions YouTube has built that set examples for its industry. “What people miss is we built a true community around video. These hundreds of competitors are dealing with the same problems but they’re not having the same growth.”

Yet another reason YouTube went big was that it became popular with the younger generation. If kids are using it often and sharing stuff with their friends (think MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter), then it’s going to be big.

Over at alvear.com, I mentioned that that I’m conducting a research report on how Internet video can impact social change.

I’m inviting non-profits, independent filmmakers and other organizations interested in social change to discuss how people can widen their distribution (to DVDs, theaters, etc.) and how they can earn additional revenue.

If you’re involved in Internet video delivery or social change, I’d like to invite you to fill out this survey. Responses will be anonymous and I’ll be able to share top level results publicly.

As an incentive for participation, I am offering a $150 Kiva gift certificate to one random person. These certificates allow you to log in to Kiva.org and micro-lend money to entrepreneurs all around the world.

The survey will close on July 7th, 2008 and the winner will be contacted privately soon afterward.

Please contact me if you have any questions. Thanks!

According to comScore, Google’s video sites grew 31 percent in November 2007 from the previous month. That makes Google’s sites including YouTube and Google Video the number one video site on the Internet with almost 3 billion videos viewed (31.3 percent share of all videos viewed).

Overall, U.S. Internet users viewed nearly 9.5 billion online videos in November. In fact 75% of Americans viewed online video in November.

Other fun facts:

• Over 75 percent of U.S. Internet users watched a video online averaging 3.25 hours of video per person during the month.
• Viewers watched an average of 3.25 hours (195 minutes) of online videos. That’s a 29% gain from the 2.52 hours (151 minutes) watched in January 2007.
• The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes.
• The average online video viewer consumed 69 videos.

Bonus: See ComScore’s press release with more figures and the list of the top 10 video properties.

Technorati Tags: comScore, Google, YouTube, streaming, research, Google video

YouTube topped the list of Internet video sites, according to Nielsen/NetRating’s research. For July 2007, YouTube had a unique audience of over 55 million people, a growth of 81% from a year ago.

YouTube continues to be the decisive number 1 video site. MySpace’s video site only has about 17.9 million users. If you count Google Video, which is number three, the total unique audience for Google/YouTube is 70,976,000 people. That’s almost 4x more than number two MySpace.

It’s interesting that Nielsen/NetRatings doesn’t put YouTube and Google together. Perhaps that’s because they still exist separately. Will Google ever integrate Google Video with YouTube? Why keep Google Video alive any longer?

Some of the other interesting insights into the Top 10 are the addition of sites like “Funny or Die”, Veoh and Break.com. Although they’re at the bottom of the list, they are breaking through.

In fact, Veoh showed the largest percent gain from a year ago, increasing its audience 183% to 2.8 million. Veoh has recently made news by filing a “pre-emptive lawsuit” against Universal Music Group (UMG).

AOL Video is a new entry in this year’s rankings and doesn’t appear in last year’s data. The rapid growth of AOL Video is because of the popularity of AOL’s gossip blog TMZ, which has lots of papparazzi video and lots of readers.

Also making a big jump is Yahoo! video up 169% from a year ago although I can’t attribute it to anything in particular.

Here’s the top 10: (Click on image to see it in full-size.)

[From Nielsen/NetRatings’s web site.]

Technorati Tags: Nielsen/Netratings, Internet video, streaming, streaming media, YouTube, Google, Google Video, Veoh

According to a survey by Park Associates, just one in five users (21%) are satisfied with videos they download from the Internet.

The definition of downloaded videos, Parks says, can be anything downloaded from peer-to-peer networks like LimeWire or BitTorrent, which are usually illegal DVD rips of or TV shows. It can also mean legitimate movies or shows like those available for purchase from iTunes.

The data was broken down between “Video Downloaders Not Using P2P Networks” and “All Video Downloaders.” See the chart below:

Interestingly, the percent of satisfied users jumps from 12% to 21% when counting all downloaders including those using legitimate services. Users downloading video from peer-to-peer systems are likely to be unsatisfied with the quality of the video, since they are usually lower-quality than legitimate pay services.

Here’s a quote from the Parks’ press release:

“People don’t see a reason to use video downloading services,” said John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates. “Sure, it saves a trip to the video store, but it takes longer, looks worse, and you end up watching it on a 17” screen. No wonder consumers are dissatisfied with the experience.”

However, that’s not always the case. A growing number of movies available on BitTorrent are DVD quality because they are actually DVD rips, with very little compression. Users can specifically search for DVD-quality files, rather than go for lower-quality Divx encoding, for example.

Searching for something like “Spider-Man ISO” will bring up high-quality DVD rips saved in ISO format, which makes it easy to burn it back into a DVD. Once you burn it into a DVD, it’s practically indistinguishable from the original DVD since it comes with chapters, titles and all the special features. The downside is that a) it’s illegal since DVDs need to be ripped of their copy protection and b) ISO files are huge.

Full-length movies encoded with Divx are usually 650MB, while ISO files are usually 1.2GB. That’s double the size and a big difference in downloading time, but a huge difference in quality.
Anyway, I suspect that many people aren’t using ISO files anyway. Only hard-core users who love quality video would take the time to download an ISO, burn it onto a DVD then watch it (either on a TV or computer).

One more point. Despite what Parks says, I think it’s possible that people taking the survey may not have known the difference between downloaded and streamed video. Lots of people don’t know the technical differences and wouldn’t be able to accurately define what “streaming” is.

I know, because I used to work for a company (and website) called Streaming Media (and wrote a book), and I always had to explain what “streaming” meant.

But perhaps consumers are more savvy about video now that we’re in the age of YouTube. Until I see the entire report this data is based on, I wouldn’t use these numbers anywhere or put much weight to them.

Bonus data:

16% said the selection of online videos is good
13% said video downloads are sold at a reasonable price.
Less than one in five people said they would download videos again in the future.

Technorati Tags: online movies, itunes, bittorrent, peer to peer, Internet movies, streaming, streaming media