The Emergence of Clip Culture

Posted on March 20, 2006

BBC has an interesting article about what it calls the emergence of a "clip culture." The article talks about the growing popularity of both streaming video and the short viral video clips that people like to email to friends and post in blogs. The article mentions MSN Video and YouTube as two popular websites for video clips.

The emergence of video sharing sites is yet another seemingly instant internet success story that has caught many by surprise.
Last month, two sites, MSN Video and Youtube, attracted nearly 10 million unique US visitors each.
While those numbers are relatively insignificant when compared with network television viewership, widespread video sharing is just getting started.
Youtube, which is home to 25 million videos and streams 15 million of them each day, just launched its service last year.
Most of the videos on Youtube and other video sharing services are not full-length features.

The article says there are three different types of clips: amateur clips, montage videos and short clips from television shows or movies. The third category has caused the most concerns in Hollywood. NBC recently overreacted and removed a popular Saturday Night Clip, called the Lazy Sunday viral, from YouTube. Eventually, the networks will probably cut deals with sites like YouTube to allow the videos to be distributed around the web as long as a short ad is included.