Video and the future of the Internet

How many people would want to take the time to download from YouTube and listen to a three-year-old reciting the plot of the first Star Wars movie. Seven million people.

That is small beer compared with watching "The Evolution of Dance" on YouTube (87 million downloads) which is equivalent to transmitting 250,000 DVDs' worth of data across the Internet. Wow.

YouTube is just the tip of the iceberg. Netflix now streams videos to its subscribers over the Internet, and both Amazon and Apple's iTunes sell movies and episodes of TV shows online. Peer-to-peer file-sharing networks have gradu­ated from transferring four-minute songs to hour-long ­Sopranos episodes. And all of these videos are higher quality--and thus more bandwidth intensive--than YouTube's.

These examples are taken from the start of an excellent article appearing in Technology Review that is about how the Internet might, or might not, cope with the deluge of video that is washing through its backbone. Dick Stroud

Two interesting storefronts that use Web video

What do you think of this ad? Maybe not.

The really interesting thing is the company behind this shopping channel (The Talk Market). It is like an Amazon market place but using video. Funny I should think of Amazon.

According to Business Week the company has just received an equity investment from Amazon. Looks like a smart move by Amazon - wait and see how things develop, if it looks like the user generated video model is successful, then buy the company and incorporate into the Amazon business model. Clever.

Turnheretravel.tv is another interesting outfit. Like all of the stuff this company does the quality is excellent. I wonder why they don't enable embedding of the video? Dick Stroud