Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Building Human-Level A.I. Will Require Billions of People

The Great AI hunger appears poised to quickly replace and then exceed the income flows it has been eliminating. If we follow the money, we can confidently expect millions, then billions of machine-learning support roles to emerge in the very near-term, majorly limiting if not reversing widespread technological unemployment. Human-directed  machine learning  has  emerged  as the  dominant  process  for the creation of  Weak AI  such as language translation, computer vision, search, drug discovery and logistics management. I ncreasingly, it appears  Strong AI , aka  AGI  or "human-level" AI, will be achieved by bootstrapping machine learning at scale, which will require billions of  humans  in-the-loop .  How does human-in the-loop machine learning work? The process of training a neural net to do something useful, say the ability to confidently determine whether a photo has been taken indoors or outside, r...
Post a Comment
Read more

Donald Trump, Entertainer-in-Chief

The days of the  presidential  presidency are behind us.   JFK was the  first TV President . He and his successors exuded a distinctly  presidential vibe as they communicated confidently to the masses, primarily through color video, usually behind a podium or in high-power settings, on a monthly or sometimes weekly basis. Donald Trump is the first Web & Reality TV President.  He spent a decade as host and producer of the hit show  The Apprentice  and exudes a distinctly colloquial vibe across cable and the web. Trump prefers titanic business settings like board rooms and communicates to the masses at a daily or even hourly rate, even after the election. Twitter is his pulpit. Trump is a seasoned, self-aware, master content producer AND actor.  In sports, the equivalent is a player/coach, a Peyton Manning or LeBron.  He's calculatedly sloppy and unpredictable, which appears to boost his authenticity and watchability. Most impo...
1 comment
Read more

IBM Watson AI XPrize Pits AI vs. Human/AI Teams

XPRize and IBM have announced the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE , a multi-stage Cognitive Computing Competition  with  a $5 million purse that challenges "teams from around the world to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful cognitive technologies to tackle some of the world’s grand challenges." Interestingly, the competition will be open to human/AI hybrid and exclusively AI entrants alike. The contest will culminate in 2020 after a series of IBM's annual "World of Watson" prelim events and draw attention to the human-empowering aspects of Artificial Intelligence.  May the smartest neural array carry the day. Pre-registration is open now at  xprize.org/AI , and detailed guidelines will be announced on May 15, 2016. TED Blog XPrize Announcement
1 comment
Read more