[nileshtrivedi]

> cute cat videos will only get you so far.

Aren't we already spending more time watching videos on YouTube / CollegeHumor and funny pics on Reddit than we do watching films? One might think that we have solved the content / attention problem. What remains to be solved is monetization.

[nemothekid]

Except YouTube hasn't solved the content problem. Monetization is a complete afterthought here. Tarantino doesn't sit down and write a movie with the goal of maximizing revenue. If you have great content, the money will follow.

The problem with YouTube's content is almost all of it is either completely forgettable, not brand safe, or just plain crappy. Ask yourself if you would pay $5/mo for access to YouTube's content. The big brands hardly want to be seen next to "cute cat videos" which is exactly why YouTube is heavily moving to have more premium content. Which connects back to the OP, its not solely about the technology - its about creating great narratives using this new medium.

Hollywood isn't about raw attention. Facebook, Google Search, News, Banner Ads, and Billboards are all about selling ads through raw attention. At the end of the day however, you wouldn't pay to use Facebook, you wouldn't pay to look at Billboards, and as we have found recently, people don't want to pay for news. Hollywood and Premium Content are about engagement. Its about creating an itch, and generating hype. You "need" to watch the next episode, you "need" to watch that next Spielberg film, you "need" to see Scarlett Johansson. That is the biggest difference Hollywood and YouTube. No one is tripping over themselves, or camping out to watch a YouTube video.

Lastly, you can now see how this problem cannot be solved solely with technology. How do you quantify the difference between a Spielberg film and a cat video?

[KaiserPro]

At what time of day?

The main problem that people fail to grasp is that nobody really cares about the technology, unless it gets in the way.

People only care about content, look at the signal to noise ratio on youtube, it's astronomically high. American TV has a lower s/n ratio, but not much lower. (I'm british so fortunately we have a stream of relatively HQ TV without the shitty twitter gimmicks that plague things like discovery.)

In short, there is no problem with monitization really, netflix has it nailed.

[lisper]

Yes, just that one little detail to work out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts