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YouTube's Expanding Prosumer Pipeline


It is no surprise that the growing number of camera-equipped mobile devices, particularly the new iPhone 3G, is catalyzing an explosion of video content to YouTube.

YouTube reports:
In the last six months, we've seen uploads from mobile phones to YouTube jump 1700%; just since last Friday, when the iPhone 3GS came out, uploads increased by 400% a day.
Particularly interesting is Google's cognizance of this trend, as reflected in their efforts to facilitate / reduce barriers the flow of mobile video content to YouTube and then to social networks.
This growth represents three things coming together: new video-enabled phones on the market, improvements to the upload flow when you post a video to YouTube from your phone, and a new feature on YouTube that allows your videos to be quickly and effortlessly shared through your social networks. It takes just a minute to connect your YouTube account to your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader accounts. Complete a simple, one-time connection on our upload page to allow all your friends and followers to get a real-time stream of your uploads to YouTube, which can be essential in this age of citizen reporting and ubiquitous sharing. (Bold emphasis mine.)
By expanding this prosumer pipeline, the forces at Google are yet again playing the positive-sum empowerment card in order to protect and expand their core prosumer base.

Less obviously, but perhaps more significantly, Google is reiterating its commitment to a faster web, making clear that their future vision includes high-bandwith life-streaming and life-logging, which makes a lot of sense considering their cognizance of the now more widely recognized exponential growth in digitized human information (as conveyed by the updated EMC information ticker) -- a trend that will clearly require a cascade of mobile video and other sensing to maintain its growth rate over the coming years.

After all, increasing the amount of rich content input is far more important to Google's strucutred data back-end and long-term than trivial matters such as the near-term monetization of YouTube. For them, it's all about the information, which means it's all about the prosumer.

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