Bill Tancer from Hitwise noted yesterday that the spike in Google Video visitors (cause by the addition of Google Video link to the Google home page) did not hurt YouTube. On the contrary both services are keeping to grow in tremendous numbers.
I think this just shows how much more potential the video market has. The big fight today is not just between the different services, but also on educating the masses that video on the Internet is easy and fast.
There are many people who went broadband just recently (or still using dial up), and they are still not aware of the fact that video on the net can be a comfortable experience.
The video market still has much more places to go. There are a few technologies still to come that has the potential to take this market to new heights:
- Video searching - Searching videos based on content and not meta data is a technology we all still waiting for.
- Advance Tagging - Most video sharing sites like YouTube lets you tag videos you upload. The next generation of services will let you tag specific moments in videos. How many times we find ourselves watching a 10 min video when all we wanted is to watch a specific minute inside. There are already a few start ups that goes in this direction. Read for example Techcrunch post on latest joiner Viddler.
- Video compression - As someone who lived in a few countries in Europe I can tell you that video experience in most of the world is still far from TV. Most of the time you need to wait around 30 - 60 seconds of buffering before the video will start and too many times the video will simply stop in the middle for more buffering. In this conditions, the TV "zapping" experience is just impossible.
Now take all this and add the fact that we will see the Internet and our living room TV set getting along much better in some way, and you can start and understand how big this market is going to be.
Suddenly all the millions that gets poured into Silicon Valley start ups don't look that much...
