Television is a tough business. It didn’t use to be. There used to be a controlled market with a limited number of channels. Then came satellite and cable and the channels grew dramatically. Now the Internet is making its entry with a whole new video distribution capability, courtesy of YouTube and other video posting sites.

Technically, the cost of making video has been collapsing for years. I remember being told, sometime around 1990, that you couldn’t shoot a video for less than $2000 per hour. Now camcorders are ubiquitous and the current/next generation of mobile phones can shoot video. If you don’t cost your own time, shooting video is hobby-cheap or cheaper.

The collapse in cost wouldn’t have meant much if there had been no way of distributing the output, but YouTube took care of that. The recent US elections were the first YouTube elections. The Republican defeat was influenced by YouTube. Politicians in the US (of all persuasions) are fast to take advantage of technology. The defeat of Senator Paul Allen (Republican), by a small margin, in the race that finally gave the US Senate to the Democrats, had a lot to do with this YouTube video clip, where Paul Allen uses the term/name “macaca” to refer to a cameraman (who was US born but of Asian Indian decent). It lost him a lot of votes and his ten point lead in the polls vanished.

It wasn’t the only political video on YouTube by any means. In fact there were many, as politicians of both sides in different Senate and Congress races posted adverts onto this free broadcast medium—in attempts either to discredit their opponents or promote themselves. Naturally, only a few of these videos attracted large audiences.

So why is it world changing?

It is world changing because suddenly there’s an uncontrolled market in video. Everyone’s a broadcaster if they want to be and a large number of people are going to the web for video content as well as television.

An interesting example of this is provided by the video entitled “Colbert Roasts President Bush—2006 White House Correspondents Dinner” which is available to view on Google.

When Stephen Colbert, the guest entertainer at this dinner, actually gave the speech which the video records, it was widely reported in the press the following day as “disappointing”, “a poor performance” etc. There was a good reason for that. Among the people Colbert was making fun of were the press. However, the posting of the video on the Internet supports a quite different opinion—that his performance was both incredibly funny, and very brave—given that President Bush, whom he was making fun of most, was seated a few seats away.

This video has been viewed almost 3 million times on the web, and may be the most popular video ever posted to the web. (To understand some of the humour you need to be a regular watcher of the satirical Colbert Report, in which Colbert pretends to be a Right Wing Opinion Maker like Bill O’Reilly of Fox).