Video Site Revolution Continues to Gather Pace

By Tim Alper

Contributing Writer

Video portals are the black holes of the Internet. Delve into them and you will find an inexhaustible font of some of the strangest and inexplicable videos known to man. They are like a vast Jungian digital collective unconscious, spread out for the entire world to probe into, if it dares. Yet their popularity continues to soar.

The concept is irritatingly simple ― upload what you like onto the web and share it with your friends, or the rest of the world. Companies like Microsoft and Apple must still be kicking themselves for not thinking of the idea of User Created Content (UCC) first, before the likes of YouTube got involved.

YouTube, which has recently been in Korea to promote the launch of its YouTube Korea service, was an overnight success story par excellance. It was founded by Americans Steve Chen and Chad Hurley at a dinner party. The pair discovered that although they and their acquaintances were happily taking videos at the party, they had no way to share their files with each other.

Steve Chen said, ``The files were too big for email, and there were no video sharing sites around. The idea suddenly came to us that were almost certainly not alone in having this problem.''

Chen admits that the odds were stacked in their favor when he and Hurley launched YouTube. He says, ``The majority of our success was down to luck. Broadband, the high-speed Internet, had just started to become commercial. Hardware prices were coming down, too. All sorts of factors were perfect for us to come onto the market.''

While YouTube is a massive global force, locally, Pandora and Daum rule the market in Korea. Pandora's share of the domestic market is huge ― they estimate that as early as 2004, they were already getting over 1 billion page views per month. Figures from more recent times indicate that just shy of a million people per day use the site in Korea.

According to Internet experts, a new age of the Internet is dawning, dubbed ``Web 2.0.'' This new age, according to the experts, will bring about a richer user experience. There will also be much more user participation, more dynamic content, the introduction of web standards, more openness and freedom.

Daum is a Korean company that specializes in the Internet ― they are one of the biggest video portal sites in Korea. Shin Jong-seob, manager of Daum's Video Services Team, believes UCC will only expand in the future. He says, ``As the Web 2.0 age approaches, users find themselves using an Internet that is in a better condition for making and using UCC, so the output is increasing all the time. And as the value of UCC increases more and more, its value goes up by the day.''

The copyright issue is a stick that a lot of people have been using to try to beat UCC sites with. Clips from TV programs, music and sports highlights are often posted without the creators' permission, violating rights that would be easy to sue over in the offline media.

American TV companies Viacom, Warner Brothers and HBO TV have all been involved in lawsuits trying to get YouTube to stop broadcasting parts of their television programs.

However, all of this looks like the last throes of dinosaur-like conventional media trying desperately to cling onto the past.

YouTube's Chen says the issue will come to a head, with UCC sites the victors. ``It is impossible to effectively monitor the huge volume of videos that are out there. It is often difficult to find out who owns the copyright on individual videos. Differing copyright laws in different countries also make the whole process harder,'' he says.

Pandora CEO Kim Kyung-ik says, ``It's a complicated issue, and we are discussing terms for an agreement with the big Korean TV channels at the moment.''

Daum and Pandora have both set up monitoring centers, which monitor videos for adult contents and copyright infringements, but with millions of videos on the sites and copyrighted material from all four corners of the earth being uploaded all the time, trying to control copyright is going to be a losing battle.

In the beginning, there was a lot of resistance to music videos being posted on UCC sites, but now record companies are clambering all over each other in the attempt to get their latest songs onto YouTube, Daum and Pandora.

But how about quality? Have a look on YouTube, Daum and Pandora and you will find a lot of what most people would consider junk ― the nonsensical ramblings of teen music fans, people reading poems they have written about their cats, endless videos of people dancing the Wondergirls' Tell Me dance (with varying degrees of success). Is there really a future in all this UCC mayhem?

``Two Chinese Boys,'' a couple of Chinese teenagers who drew mirth from around the world by lip-synching songs by The Backstreet Boys, drew so many hits on video sites, such as YouTube, that sportswear giants Adidas swooped in to sign them to contracts so that future UCC performances would be performed in branded tracksuits.

The ``Two Chinese Boys'' might be an anomaly for the moment, but they might well be a sign of things to come.

Shin says, ``UCC is a lot of fun, so people who use video sites are staying longer and longer. That enables UCC sites to make a profit. Commercially Created Content (CCC) is also starting to surface, with companies looking to promote themselves through this new form of media. They want to blend UCC and business.''

And Shin thinks that the UCC fever that has gripped Korea is a form of backlash against the more established forms of the media. He says, ``People are sick of watching formulaic, overproduced information on TV. They find it formulaic and samey. So even if UCC, as a new source of information, is very rough, they are lapping it up. They can't get enough of this new, empowering force.''