YouTube is already a big player in The Cable Game, and the news game overall. That is, just about anything that happens on the news--from the latest about George W. Bush to the latest about Paris Hilton--ends up on YouTube. So YouTube is part of the "buzz machine" of the modern media: Even if you don't see the event directly, you know about it soon enough, thanks to buzz. And when a video clip goes "viral," that usually means that it's on YouTube in a big buzzy way.
It's apparent that the TV channels have been slow to fully appreciate the power of YouTube--YouTube has become, in effect, a sort of shadow TV channel, in which if you miss something on TV, you can catch it on YouTube, because somebody uploaded it there. Yes, there's lots of controversy about this process, and even some litigation, but there's also the realization that these video operations aren't going away; even if YouTube disappeared tomorrow, something else would take its place.
And now I see, thanks to the delightfully named Jemima Kiss, writing in The Guardian, the UK newspaper, that YouTube is thinking about creating a new "TV channel," to formalize, if you will, its ever-enlarging role in the mediaverse. And yet it's interesting that YouTube officials feel the need to describe their new venture as a "TV channel"--a reminder, yet again, that the overwhelming instinct of people is to make the shock of the seem old and safely familiar. As the 18th century British political philosopher Edmund Burke put it, the challenge before the wise leader is to "channel the tides of change in the canals of custom." (That's channel as a verb, not as a noun!) People want new technology, and new things, but they also want to keep their old and familiar things. It's a paradox that smart politicians, and smart marketers, can figure out how to manage.
And YouTube is playing it smart: They are couching their new approach to the media in the old form of the media. In effect, to borrow a somewhat unfortunate phrase from Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, YouTube is "building a bridge to the past."
By the same token, of course, the older media, including cable news, have the chance to "build a bridge to the future." That is, starting from their strong base in here-and-now TV, they can expand their own video operations, which will have the additional value of helping them profit from the content that they are providing now, much of which ends up, already, on YouTube.
So even though YouTube got out front first, there's still plenty of time for the TV networks to recover--but they have to get with the video program.
