#53, Is blogTV Helping YouTube?

Which One Would You Choose?, San Mateo County, California, July ‘08, artistic view.


Would You Like A Job Like That?, San Mateo County, California, July ‘08, artistic view.

We can only say that we do not know, but promise to pay close attention to find out. Simply it is too soon to notice much difference. It is obvious that very many YouTube people are moving to blogTV in an apparent effort to boost their YouTube views and increase subscriber base. But an impact of that shift is rather subtle; those that were going up are still going up, those that started to decline are going down.
Since preparing blogTV shows takes time away from video making, we should see a negative impact on video quality coming from YouTube members who recently joined blogTV. Watch for that! You already saw videos that only announce somebody’s appearance on blogTV. Are you watching those? Also, live blogTV appearances are turned into YouTube videos. Are you watching those? Can someone reverse his or her slide down on YouTube by promoting himself/herself on blogTV? The participants obviously think so, because otherwise they would not be involved in those extra activities. Can blogTV take some audience away from YouTube? Again it is too soon to know that. Can someone move entirely to blogTV, become popular there, and forget about YouTube altogether? So far this hasn’t happened, nobody officially announced anything like that, but probably will. According to Wikipedia, first two major YouTube defections were Christine Gambito (HappySlip) and Michael Buckley (WhatTheBuckShow).

At this moment, it may be easier and cheaper to be on blogTV. No editing software is required - just a laptop with a web camera and a browser. This is going to change fairly soon since the demand for a better quality is going to grow pretty fast. For the higher quality, the production costs that are tiny right now are going to increase considerably. Producing good HD quality, live shows is going to be expensive. This will eliminate majority of people who are now very happy with blogTV. Actually YouTube suffers from exactly the same problems. No HD videos on the horizon for both, I’m afraid. However, there are already many places where you can watch both HD videos and HD live shows; those remain rather small.

As far as I am concerned, there are no plans for me to appear on blogTV anywhere soon. I decided I will only be watching, and maybe writing about it from time to time.