Online Video, TV and You Tube

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If you haven’t at least heard of You Tube, you must be living with my parents in their retirement community.

Watching videos online is the fastest growing activity of all trackable activities on the web (and I’m not sure there is anything untrackable).  I typed in “Online TV” into Google (the search engine) and it came up with 114 MILLION responses.  In other words, you can safely throw your TV out the window and still catch your favorite soaps - just now on your computer.

The other form of online video that is widely popular are self-produced videos that are posted on You Tube.  You name it, it’s there.  Most of them are super short (under 3 minutes) but others are more poignant and worth watching (like the Last Lecture which has been viewed nearly 8 million times).  It is best to demo what I’m talking about instead of forcing you to read more words…when you can watch a video.

An intro to these two videos I’ve included: My nephew Will, a freshman in college, has a You Tube “channel” that you can actually subscribe to. So when he posts a new video (for fun or his video classes at college), you’ll get a notice of it and can click on the link to watch it.  Many people have their own You Tube channels, he’s not among an elite crowd.

I found a video he took and posted of his sister, my niece, and he titled it “Lydia Flies.” With some cool special effects, it does look like she’s flying.  Now, when I went back to You Tube to find it again to embed the link (in other words, allow you to see it in this post), I typed in “Lydia Flying” by accident.  It just used to be that you were amazed some else in the phone book had your same or similar name.  Lydia Flying is above, Lydia Flies is below.  And both are available for anyone to watch - like the millions of other videos posted on You Tube.

ps A little Blah Blah: This represents the ultimate in what they call “consumer generated content” that dominates the behavior of “Web 2.0.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOTcEpYb-Dc&feature=related]