The rise of 'clip culture'

According to Wikipedia, "Clip culture", compared to the "lean-back" experience of seeing traditional TV, refers to an internet activity of sharing and viewing a short video, mostly less than 15 minutes. The culture began as early as the development of broadband network, but it sees the boom since 2005 when websites for uploading clips are emerging on the market, including YouTube, Google Video, MSN Video.

The video clips often shows a moments of significance, humour, oddity, prodigy performance. Sources for video clips include news, movies, music video and amateur video shot. In addition to the clip recorded by high-quality camcorders, it is getting common to produce clips with digital camera, webcam, and mobile phone.

In fact, clip culture is so popular, many internet-savvy users are abandoning the TV altogether for the excellent collection of video clips available online. Sites like ThrowAwayYourTV.com support and encourage internet-users to opt for the "mind-blowing content" available on the video sharing sites instead of the "boring and tedious" traditional TV.

The emergence of video sharing sites is yet another seemingly instant internet success story that has caught many by surprise. Telecommunications companies and intransigent broadcasters face an even tougher choice, as their vision of an on-demand converged internet, must now compete with the clip culture.

Last month, two sites, MSN Video and YouTube, attracted nearly 10 million unique US visitors each. While those numbers are relatively insignificant when compared with network television viewer-ship, widespread video sharing is just getting started. YouTube, which is home to 25 million videos and streams 15 million of them each day, just launched its service last year. Most of the videos on YouTube and other video sharing services are not full-length features.

Instead, taking their cue from the movie studios (whose previews or trailers are little more than a collection of clips) and sports networks (whose popular highlight shows are nothing but clips), the overwhelming majority of videos are shorter clips running anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes.

The clips themselves fall into three broad categories. Home-grown or amateur clips constitute a significant percentage of the collection, as the mushrooming of user-generated content moves from blog postings to innovative multimedia featuring audio and video.

These clips should not be underestimated. While user-generated content was previously all but unavailable to the general public - with the forgettable exception of television shows such as America's Funniest Home Videos - the best of user-generated video today attracts large audiences and competes with anything being offered on the major networks.

Montage videos, which represent the next-generation of protest and fan sites, constitute the second category. A YouTube search for Prime Minister Tony Blair or President George Bush yields hundreds of videos, many of which bring together multiple clips to make powerful political statements.

Telecommunications companies and intransigent broadcasters face an even tougher choice, as their vision of an on-demand converged internet, must now compete with the clip culture. This presents new challenges, since users are increasingly not satisfied with merely consuming content, but rather demand the ability to share and re-create it.

With the submarine cable at our doorsteps, we can finally take part with some of the ongoing internet trends. We looked at several of these video-sharing sites. If you want to post, watch, share, or edit video online, read along.

YouTube.com

YouTube is the video-sharing site everyone's already heard of, and it's arguably the best of the bunch. It has got the biggest collection of video clips, the best community and lots and lots of users. And the features are pretty impressive too; including tabbed pages, ratings, user-favourites, flagging, tagging, and commenting. Users can easily create playlists, subscribe to other's uploads, subscribe to tags. The video quality is decent and it's very easy to use.

If you want to step up to more community features and get widespread viewership of your video clip, YouTube gets the job done.

Google Video
video.google.com

Google Video is a free Google service that allows anyone to upload video clips to Google's web servers as well as make their own media available free of charge or commercially through the Google Video Store. Besides amateur media, internet videos, viral ads, and movie trailers, the service also aims to distribute commercial professional media, such as televised content and movies.

The main appeal of Google Video is the simple fact that it's from Google. Reflecting the company's reputation of producing impressive services one after another, Google Video became very popular with the masses.

Google Video sports the typical clean and sparse Google layout. Uploading requires you download the Google Video Uploader. The service allows you to add plenty of metadata, including a transcript so that users can easily search and play videos directly from Google Video, as well as download video files and remotely embed them on their sites. Users can also monetise their content by assigning a sale price to each clip.

Jumpcut.com
If you want to alter your video online in any way, now that the fibre optic is finally at the doorstep, through editing, remixing, or combining your clips with those from other users, then head on over to Jumpcut and don't look back. Jumpcut really offers the first leap forward in online video sharing, and is worth a look even if you have no use for editing features. Playing with Jumpcut's features, you immediately understand that the future of online video is here. Very, very slick, but get too effects crazy and your video slows down. Jumpcut lets you easily share the video with anyone on any site or blog.

Vimeo.com
Vimeo tries to be the Flicker for video, with a nice and clean interface and simplistic upload process. It also allows tagging, commenting and voting and doesn't burn in a logo in the video. Although it doesn't offer any editing yet, it lets you download the original video, put the video on any site you want or even create an RSS feed for it. The quality is pretty good. But the 20 megabyte limit is too limiting.

If you just want to get a video clip online and share it with friends via email or on your own blog, Vimeo wins for its speed, ease-of-use, and simple playback functions. It also lets users download the original file, and features some light community features. One of the few sites I used that I never had a problem with.

Of course, there are more services out there. But many of them are just clones of services mentioned above.

The telecommunications and broadcast industries' vision of the future of the internet invariably involves its convergence with television. Large telecommunications companies are busy gearing up for this future by investing heavily in new high-speed networks whose focus is not faster internet connectivity, but rather entry into the high-definition television broadcast market.

Similarly, the major broadcasters are emphasising the need to deliver their content across multiple platforms including conventional television, downloads and streaming services, as well as wireless devices. Based on pilot projects and other small-scale initiatives, it is fair to say that this future is already here.

In North America, companies such as Verizon and Telus are actively expanding their high-definition television coverage, while office workers throughout the US were glued to their computer screens last week as the CBS television network streamed the NCAA men's college basketball tournament online. South Korea is even more advanced, with thousands of people now enjoying access to broadcast quality television on their mobile phones.

And this is just the beginning. The clip culture has a long way to go before it turns out to be a proper alternative to traditional TV, but it certainly has the potential and popularity.