Ryan MacMillan

Whilst Maggie and Dan have been extolling the virtues of the new breed of online video headed by Hulu, 4OD, BBC iPlayer et al I’ve been back to thinking about where online video all began: YouTube.

It appears as though this past week heralded the announcement of the winners for the second annual YouTube Awards. You can be forgiven for having missed this auspicious occassion - everyone did. Whilst YouTube is so often a great tool for creating buzz it seems to have failed to generate any for its awards. Mind you, I’ve got a few theories on this: 1) They didn’t bother trying. 2) No-one cares if a video they chuckled at 11 months ago won an award - we clicked, we laughed, we moved on. 3) With categories such as ‘Most adorable Video’ (yes, seriously) it was hardly going to attract the next Steven Spielberg. 4) The prizes really sucked: winners received (and I quote) “bragging rights, a trophy, and a special invitation to an event later this year” (quick! pass me the handicam!).

Limited advertising to get submissions, terrible categories, abismal prizes and no effort to properly announce the winners does not, a good competition, make. This is a shame since the idea of an online video competition is, I think, a good one. Think about it, people are itching to make content (look at how many videos are uploaded per day accross the net!), and since YouTube already has a rating system its not hard to cream the top and get some good content. All this is already in place and YouTube (sort of) took advantage of it. But they could have done so much more.

Online video is too often associated with bloopers and illegal network TV content. However, there is a lot of brilliant content out there that is innovative and people are getting jobs off the back of what they produce. Someone (possibly YouTube) shoud really get behind this and really reward the best. Surely with all of Google’s money they could get some top talent to judge entries and get some better prizes together (possibly even a contract/job/day on a movie set etc…) I think people would jump at the chance to get involved in a well conceived competition like this. Hell, in the MTV, celebrity obssessed culture we live in they could even hold a full blown awrds night a la VMA’s with loads of celeb types. It’d be easy to get sponorship and make a bit of moola and at the risk of pushing this idea too far they could even take the money made from sponsorship and invest it back in to making YouTube better.

Any online video hosting site could take on this idea, its just that being the biggest, YouTube have the best means to make a good fist of championing genuinely innovative online video (its fast becoming - if it isn’t already - a medium all of its own anyway). Sadly YouTube are content with what is frankly a dire set of awards that have more in common with Jeremy Beadle than the Oscars and for the largest video hosting site this doesn’t seem good enough.