Anyone left in any doubts as to the value of Web video can argue no longer, as we now have a full length movie being released on DVD, all based on what started as a five minute viral YouTube hit.

Last year saw 300 released, a movie detailing the brave souls of the legendary Spartan army who fought against the Persian army until death or glory became their saviour.

Inspiration For Spoofs

When 300 came out, a huge amount of spoofs were made and put on YouTube, Yahoo Video, Metacafe and the like. Most of these were mash-ups mixing 300 with other films, and pop culture references such as Monty Python.

However, there was one which stood out against all the others, being a well made, brilliantly produced original piece detailing the Spartans who didn’t quite make the movie. Named 305, it was viewed by almost 4 million people, and became a true viral hit.

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If you want further proof of how much YouTube has become an integral part of all our lives, you need look no further than the fact that when the site suffers an outage of less than an hour, it becomes major news.

Websites, both small or large, seldom viewed or wildly popular suffer from outages. It can be a huge number of factors which cause them, but they rarely cause even a ripple of excitement.

Everyone & His Mother

However, when YouTube went offline for a time, thought to be about an hour, at around 7am PDT, everyone and his mother seemed to notice.

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If you are like me, when you heard that Google had bought YouTube for $1.6 billion back in November 2006, you wondered “Why couldn’t that have been me?”

Well, maybe now it could be, as with the help with StartYourTube, you too can start a video sharing site to mimic YouTube.

Using YouTube

The people behind the website realise that YouTube is by far the most popular video sharing destination on the Internet, and have utilised that popularity to entice people to sign up to the site.

The site even includes the immortal line “YouTube sold for $1.6 billion. How much will you sell yours for?” feeding straight in to the egos of people who think they could be behind the next Web phenomenon.

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When Hulu was launched as a joint venture between NBC and Fox last October, YouTube suddenly became their enemy - NBC even deleted it’s YouTube channel and all of the content.

However, it seems there is now an official Hulu channel on YouTube. It was started on March 3rd, but has only now been noticed by The LA Times.

March 3rd places the channel’s launch date just prior to Hulu launching publicly, after it’s trial beta version. So what is a Hulu channel doing on one of, if not the biggest rival it has?

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When Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, my guess would be they planned to make some money out of it. So far though, that hasn’t happened.

YouTube has experimented with video advert formats, but overall, the site remains an ad-free, and hence profit-free Web destination.

Eric Schmidt Speaks

It seems that may all be about to change however, after Google CEO Eric Schmidt told CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo in an interview to be screened later today.

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YouTube has gone beyond everybody’s expectations, and become by far the largest online video resource in the world, and one of the most visited sites on the Internet bar none.

So with this in mind, you would think that all is rosy with the world, and the company is in a very enviable position. It is, of course, but this lofty position also comes with its fair share of problems.

10 Hours Of Content A Minute

For starters, there are the sheer logistics involved when dealing with over 10 hours of content being uploaded to the site every minute. And with that comes the responsibility to filter content, both for unsavoury videos such as porn or violence, and copyrighted clips.

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Last year saw YouTube integrated in to Google Earth, allowing surfers to watch videos tagged with the locations they are viewing on the Google application.

Now, YouTube has also been integrated in to Google Maps, and this has a much more commercial side to it, not on Google’s part, but for businesses in the US.

The feature was announced on the official Google Maps blog, and the example they used to showcase the new integration is a small bakery in San Francisco (as seen below).

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