Building on centralization in a post-YouTube era
One common theme I’ve found running through numerous recent posts about YouTube is a call for diversity, redundancy, and decentralization in the online video eco-system.
Regarding the “fair use massacre” on YouTube, Dean Jansen of Miro writes,
“One thing is clear to us: this will remain a problem as long as one video website is as dominant as YouTube. Further decentralization and openness in video are critical pieces to this complex puzzle.”
My first impression is to agree - Hear! Hear! Centralization is bad! - but is this entirely true? What affordances do a centralized service provide that a cluster of non-Youtube video services cannot?
The user contributions to YouTube represent what may be the most diverse collection of video ever assembled. What role has centralization played in its creation?
Before YouTube’s ascendency in early 2006, many of today’s viewers were not watching video on the web. Sure, some were torrenting the O.C. each week and checking Rocketboom on a daily basis but the aggregate activity of the pre-YouTube period does not even remotely compare with today’s numbers.
Whereas the slippery, decentralized nature of blogging initially befuddled some observers and created an unwelcoming insider/outsider dynamic, YouTube’s singular dominance offered new participants an obvious place to begin exploring online video. Centralization lowered the barrier to entry and accompanied an astonishingly rapid adoption of online video-sharing and video-viewing practices. Presented with the permissive text entry fields on social-networking sites like MySpace, users learned how to carry their video data from YouTube into other online spaces. Unfortunately, copy-pasting HTML to embed a remote flash player is not the same as copy-pasting actual video data. As these videos disappear from YouTube, they similarly vanish from any site on which they are embedded.
Christina Xu echoes this observation in her call for increased mirroring,
“Part of the problem (it is actually a feature, but a problem in this case) is that when people want content on their site, they link instead of copy. We need more people to copy if we want this stuff to survive!”
The centralization that initially welcomed new users to YouTube, now leaves the site, its community, and their rich collection of video vulnerable to every frivolous lawsuit, spurious copyright claim, and technical challenge that comes down the pipe.
Fortunately, this problem is not new.
YouTube’s game-changing popularity closely mirrors the life-cycle of Napster first incarnation (1999-2001). Before Napster, a handful of geeks traded mp3 files on FTP sites and IRC channels. After Napster, people all over the world discovered and enjoyed new music on their computers, Chuck D was debating Lars Ulrich on Charlie Rose, and the music industry cashed its last major paycheck.
The combination of popularity and centralization proved to be Napster’s chief weakness and its halcyon days were short-lived. Although its public profile might suggest that the iTunes Music Store is the historical successor to Napster, its limited collection of recordings and imperfect file format pale next to the strange, surprising, and diverse recordings found on Napster 1.0.
Napster’s egalitarian dynamics were lost in the wake of its demise. Sophisticated users now find their way into private, Galtian niches and enjoy the suggestions of mp3 bloggers while the rest of the Napster generation either accepts the limitations of authorized catalogs or risks the viruses, spam, and spyware of illicit music-sharing.
Are we doomed to repeat this unfortunate arrangement in the post-YouTube era?
Will a select few users cordon themselves off into private encampments while the rest must choose between the top-down curation of authorized streams and the pop-up laden wilderness of video link-farms?
Furthermore, if this truly is the end of YouTube, what else do we lose in the transition? What becomes of the millions of viewers who recorded, edited, uploaded, ripped, remixed, mirrored, and/or reupped the six billion videos served by Google last December? How many will continue to share videos with another service? How many will have recorded their last?
In comparing YouTube’s entrophy with that of MySpace, Lilah asks,
“Eventually, though, isn’t [YouTube] going to destroy itself?”
It certainly seems an apt comparison. YouTube is fouling emergent community behavior and playing feature catch-up with its competitors; symptoms familiar to the ends of both the Friendster and MySpace eras.
Social-networking migrants have plent of reasons to delight in the contemporary Facebook experience but how many are not occasionally struck with nostalgia for the anarchic audio-visual possibilities of the customized MySpace profile page?
A year from now, will we lament the passing of YouTube’s odd network effects? Will we long for the days when a cellphone video of high school kids dancing in school would follow a multi-million dollar music video?
Or will we have developed a truly decentralized system that encourages communication across niches and provides even greater opportunities for discovery?
(Cross-posted to the YouTomb blog.)
Tags: centralization, design, freeculture, freedom, internet, media, network, participation, video, web, youtomb, youtube
February 6th, 2009 at 10:51:02 (PST -04:00)
xoxo