Daily Clerks

YouTube this. YouTube that. Now-a-days, you can’t really do much of anything without hearing about them. And if you haven’t heard about them, then where the heck have you been? This popular video sharing site is used by millions to waste their time away, especially at work.

Besides wasting time, it’s also highly entertaining, since you can watch clips of regular joes and janes doing whatever they damn well please, as well as watch some awesome clips of the daily show and the colbert report.

But all of this eats up precious bandwidth which is costing YouTube a lot of cash to feed the hungry viewers. Even with all of the funding they have received they have yet to turn a profit, and no doubt there will be a long time before they can turn a profit…especially if they don’t change their ways soon.

So how would they become profitable faster Simple. Cut costs!

How would they do this? Simple. Utilize bit torrent and distribute the videos amongst all of their users. Especially their most popular/watched videos.

How would this be done? YouTube can build an application that is basically a YouTube VidViewer, that will store bits of videos onto your harddrive. All encrypted of course. There was a service that did this for distributed backups, which I cannot recall, but it failed because people were wary of having their personal docs on someone else’s computer. So its doable.

The YouTube VidViewer would serve 4 functions.
1. allow user to view videos
2. allow YouTube to distribute the bandwidth for videos
3. allow YouTube to display ads in the viewer
4. allow YouTube to share the revenue to the viewer based on how many hours he’s online. (this is why showing ads would make sense as well, since the user would get a cut of it)

Doing all of this would allow for YouTube to cut down on their single most expensive item, which is bandwidth. It will also give them the much needed revenue stream, and by sharing revenue with it’s user base, it will allow them to keep their HUGE user base.

So YouTube…get off your ass and build this already! None of the technologies that I have mentioned are new. But for your business, they definitely deserve a visit.

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