The Library of Youtube

Yeah…lemme see American Idol from last week….

In 1988 I left my  job as a producer at CBS News to go to Gaza with a small video camera and start shooting my own stories.

I spent a month in Gaza living in the Jabalya Refugee Camp and shot two piece that I sold to the MacNeil Lehrer Newshour for $50,000;00

MacNeil/Lehrer was happy to pay $50,000 for the two pieces because it was less than they would have paid if they had sent a producer and crew on their own.

Those days are over.

No one these days is going to get $50K for a couple of video stories.

That’s because everyone and their brother has a video camera today, including half the people in Gaza.

The perceived value of a video report has collapsed as the market has been flooded with content from millions of people with millions of video cameras around the world.  Video from Gaza, or indeed going there with a video camera is no longer a rarity, and no longer worth paying for. Or at least not 50k worth.

What we are watching is a veritable explosion of video content worldwide.  People now upload 24 hours of video to Youtube every minute.

Many years ago, (many), I went across 57th Street from the CBS Broadcast Center to the CBS tape library.

The tape library was a mess.

One of the first places Larry Tische decided to cut back on costs was on the library staff. So it was just a giant warehouse filled with boes and boxes of umatic tape, much of it unmarked all of it uncatalogued.

My first business partner, Jan Stenbeck, the Swedish billionaire and genius, upon hearing of the conditions in the CBS library, offered Tische an interesting deal: he would clean up and manage the library for free if he could take 50% of the lease rights to everything in the library.

Tische turned him down. That was probably a mistake.

Stenbeck could see the value of a video library in a world in which there were going to be 500+ cable channels.

The demand for video content has now far transcended what Stenbeck saw for 500 channels.

Now, between 1200 cable channels, satellite, iPads, iPods and the web, the demand for video content is far greater.

And so the value of the libraries of video that we are building all the time is even moreso.

But libraries, as Stenbeck understood, have to be organized and managed,

In ancient Rome, manuscripts were rare and valuable. In Alexandria, in northern Egypt, the Library of Alexandria was the greatest reposotiry of written books and documents in the world.

Our Library of Alexandria today is online – in places like Youtube.

And we are only 3 or 4 years into The Library of Youtube.

But it is vastly mineable for content – if we can organize it.

Want to make a documentary about America’s involvement in Iraq? The material is all already here – between Youtube and what is in the NBC or CBS libraries – wherever they are.

Want to make a history of America’s Hip Hop music. Youtube + MTV.

Want to do a sports series? Youtube + ESPN.

There is no reason that The History Channel has to be The Hitler Channel.

There is so much more – and it is of so much value, most of which is completely untouched.

All it takes is a little organization and there is a real business there.

As Stenbeck understood.

But then again, he wasn’t a billionaire for nothing.