Move over GooTube?

Things are getting interesting in the Xmas runup....

Google paid $1.65bn for YouTube, but a report today in Forbes says that a new challenger to YouTube is already growing up in Paris. Called DailyMotion, it is apparently the new location du jour for all the stuff you can no longer get on YouTube.

Even more interesting is one of the links to Daily Episodesthat aggregates all the plethora of little outfits that specialise in collating and collecting various TV shows online.

Net net...content is Hydra-esque, cut down one head and it reappears in 2 more.

On another track, BT is apparently going to launch BTVision next week, but it seems to be a fairly soft launch and will only really get into gear next year.

This is risky...the space is moving so fast now, we have already hypothesized on this blog that laptop based TV services will move very fast to fill the IPTV gap, and as the BBC reporter Jane Wakefield notes this week in the BBC's series on Future TV, quoting Dr David Price of Envisional:

The pirating of popular TV shows is a growing problem for the TV industry as viewers increasingly demand their own viewing timetables.

An on-demand culture plus the growing speed and uptake of broadband are making TV the most pirated asset on the internet, Dr Price says.

He estimates that must-see shows like Lost are getting over a million illegal downloads per episode - up from around 150,000 a few years ago.

"It is now as easy to download a TV show through a website as it is to set your VCR," Dr Price says.

"These days, missing a TV shows presents little problem to anyone with even a basic knowledge of the internet.

Gosh....shock horror - and no one ever thought that Napster + Video Bandwidth = Peer to Peer Video? In fact the big change is that Napster never had advertising to support it, whereas this is the case today - thus potentially collapsing the revenue base of the TV companies the content is being taken from.

I was however a bit disappointed that the BBC article on Future TV technology made no reference to either the use of laptops as set top boxes, nor of using other lower cost devices such as gaming machines, especially since the BBC R&D guys are up on this arena.

Kudos though for the interview of the Smosh Brothers who are a favourite of my kids on our MyPCTV setup. I had blogged on these guys earlier in the year, in essence a camcorder and relevant content beats the best (Ad filled) TV as far as mine offspring are concerned.

ITV are you listening, this is important!

(By the way, I wonder how ITV's decision to hire a senior - and very expensive - Broadcast TV person to save them will pan out, as I believe the answer to their woes does not lie in the conventional TV direction...should be an interesting saga over the next few months.)

Nic Brisbourne has also blogged on the internet's revolutionary impact on TV and has an interesting* diagram on it's evolution here and pointed to an interesting report from Bear Sterns on the emergence of the market.

* interesting to us because in May, a very worthy TV Industry magazine refused to take a not dissimilar article they had actually commissioned from us that dealt with the structure of the emerging IP based "broadcast" TV industry (as opposed to IPTV) - we were apparently totally misguided in our views - how times change

Nic and I have chatted on our joint view that "channels" will unbundle into many hundreds (nay, thousands) of separate niche TV streams, and that Aggregators and WebTV EPG's will be far more "Search and Discover" in nature going forward. However, the filtering will be critical, I personally do not believe social networks can do all the heavy lifting so databases like Pandora's will be required.

And key to all this will be the Metadata. The clips in YouTube would be much less valuable without the tags, ratings et al.

Postcript - found this really great article by Andrew Chen on BitTorrent market dynamics.