Phil
http://www.fab4beatles.co.uk

I really wish I could agree about people getting wise to the problems caused by DRM, by the way; I just don’t see it happening outside a handful of the digerati. Far more common is this response.

and the stickiness of Fairplay DRM may prove to be a hindrance not a help, as more and more people begin to realise the limitations of the model they have signed up to. like when they try and play one of the tunes they bought on their cool new phone, for example. i don’t think a tied proprietary service and proprietary hardware architecture can provide long term lock in. i really don’t. note complaints about apple’s hardware quality. note slowing growth there. apple will have a good run – but i am not going to bet on proprietary.

iTunes, at this point, has no defensibility problem because it is linked to a very sticky pile of DRM, and to the most popular single piece of hardware in the first world (which they’ve kept other windows software out of so far.) If they’d used open standards (like, say, http, HTML and Flash like some companies I can think of then I’d agree they’d have a defensibility problem.

(By the way, that Beatles clip… that is illegal, and the labels will come down hard on it at some point, we all know that, right?

Oh yes – the IBM adds have been watched a total of about 120K times. Assuming they’re not all IBM employees that’s pretty respectable qouldn’t you say?

i don’t know about you Luis, but i remember people saying the same thing about Google until quite recently. all Google can do is throw more servers at the problem….

i think Youtube is already pretty darned viral. many people have sent me links. i can’t say that of any other vido service. obviously i am a self-selecting audience of one, but it tells me something folks are pointing the content my way.

“defensible” – that will depend on the execution, obviously, and the discovery of its own adwords equivalent. But i am not writing them off. someone is going to have to do the capex right?

i actually think iTunes suffers from a defensibility problem, to your point. i can see a scenario where is an also ran in five years.

its all in play – the disruptions are huge. its hard to call the future. but value – there is a lot of value in youtube.

To put it another way- clearly you’re right that web video is a billion-dollar business. But it seems to me that there is no reason YouTube will dominate that market in 2-3 years like it does now. They just don’t do anything interesting/unique enough, or sticky/network-effect-y enough, to keep them the dominant player in the long term.