Michael Jackson’s death has dominated all areas of the media since Thursday, online video included. The King Of Pop may be no more but his influence on the world continues on.

Michael Jackson died suddenly and unexpectedly on June 25, 2009 after suffering a cardiac arrest. He collapsed at his Los Angeles home, was taken to hospital, and declared dead after paramedics spent an hour trying to resuscitate him.

In The Action

Online video immediately became involved when news channels around the world showed footage of the paramedics arriving at Michael Jackson’s home in L.A. The video looked to have been shot on a cellphone or small video camera by a passer-by. The quality wasn’t great but it provided the first shots on the ground of what was happening.

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You surely cannot have missed what is currently happening in Iran. Coverage of the disputed presidential election and the protests that have followed has been everywhere. But most of all, it’s been available via the increasingly important medium of online video.

The Back Story

The 2009 Iranian presidential elections were held on June 12, 2009. The result, that sitting president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election with 66 percent of the public vote, was duly announced and then immediately disputed by the opposition, ordinary voters, and other countries.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the man who nabbed 33 percent of the vote, called for peaceful protests to take place, and these began in Tehran shortly after. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei first urged the nation to back the president, before denouncing the demonstrations as illegal.

Protests still happened over the weekend, but the Ayatollah’s declaration coincided with a much stronger use of force against the protesters. On Saturday, there were reported to have been ten deaths, all of protesters having been shot by pro-government security forces. Among them was a young lady named Neda Agha Soltai.

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YouTube has seen off another contender to its throne, with Microsoft preparing to kill off Soapbox, or at least substantially shutter the user-generated portion of the site. If even Microsoft cannot hope to compete, is YouTube too dominant for the health of the online video sector?

No To YouTube, Yes To Soapbox

Before Google spent $1.65 billion acquiring YouTube in 2006, Microsoft was thought to be interested in buying the site itself. When Google got there first, Microsoft issued a statement saying that while it had “evaluated acquiring this type of technology several months ago” it had decided against it. Instead it was going to build its own video-sharing Web site as this was “a more cost-effective way to compete in this new space.”

That service was named Soapbox and was launched in a private beta by the end of that same year. It launched fully in 2007, and was clearly a YouTube clone. The only real difference being its approach to copyrighted material. While YouTube leaves the discovery of this content to the copyright holder, Microsoft took the task on itself.

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Everyone knows YouTube is losing lots more money to run than it’s bringing in, right? Wrong. Sure, a Credit Suisse report suggested as much earlier this year but the figures may not actually stack up. In fact, new research suggests YouTube may actually be close to breaking even.

YouTube may be massive, both in terms of popularity and the sheer amount of content, but it isn’t yet a moneymaking proposition for its owners, Google. Even Google admits this quite readily. But the situation may not be as bad as a Credit Suisse report published in April of this year implied.

Credit (Crunch) Suisse

That report by Credit Suisse analysts, Spencer Wang and Ken Sena, was widely reported. It was titled, ‘Deep Dive into YouTube’, and basically made educated guesstimates about what money Google can expect to see coming in to YouTube during 2009. The numbers were not a pretty sight.

Although Credit Suisse estimated YouTube would make $240 million in revenue this year, that figure would be countered by operating expenses of an estimated $711 million. Even the least educated industry watcher can see these figures, if true, would result in an annual loss of £471 million over the course of a year.

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Google is continuing to struggle to make YouTube profitable. All those eyes watching the site should be worth a mint, but turning viewers into revenue isn’t as easy as it sounds. Maybe giving users the choice of which adverts to watch is the solution?

Monetizing YouTube

YouTube is by far the biggest online video site on the Web. The number of viewers watching videos every day is huge, as is the number of videos uploaded to the site every day. But despite these statistics, YouTube is still not profitable, and maybe never will be.

The success of YouTube is actually part of the problem because it means the costs involved in storing and delivering all that data to all those people are mind-blowing. Another problem is monetization. The vast majority of YouTube videos cannot even be monetized, and delivering ads on the ones that can is a tricky balancing act.

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ISPs have been showing concern for the amount of bandwidth used by online video for some time now. However, the first salvo now seems to have been launched in a war that is likely to get very bloody over the next few years.

Net Neutrality Vs. Costs

Net Neutrality is the idea that all Internet traffic should be treated the same, no matter where it’s coming from, or what it’s being used for. It’s an important tenet for the future of online video because here is a medium that, by its very nature, requires more bandwidth than any other.

Cisco recently estimated that, by 2013, 90 percent of total Web traffic will be from video. This is down to the fact that video uses more data than Web pages, images, or text files. As well as the fact that online video is growing ever more popular, with new services being launched and new viewers discovering the joy of video on demand.

ISPs are not happy with the way things are going. Most, at least in the UK, now offer services with unlimited bandwidth and downloads. More fool them, maybe, but while offering customers these kinds of deals, they are starting to complain about being burdened with the costs of delivering online video.

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Could an International version of the BBC iPlayer be on the way? Possibly, if rumors of talks happening between Google and the BBC prove to be true. Could this finally be where the international licensing of television programs starts taking the Internet and online video into consideration?

I’ve long argued for the relaxation of international rights licensing in order to open the online video market up. The Web has made the world a much smaller place than ever before and television networks and content providers need to realize this.

Hulu Vs BBC iPlayer

As a Brit, I’ve been frustrated to see Hulu launch in the United States only, with a lot of great content on the service I’d love the chance to watch but cannot due to being resident in the wrong country. In May it emerged that Hulu may be planning to right this wrong by launching a Hulu service for the UK, before potentially rolling out an international service to the rest of Europe and beyond.

In the same way I’m annoyed at not being able to (legally) watch Hulu on my computer, many Americans feel the same way about the BBC iPlayer. I’m banned from watching the likes of Heroes and 24 over the Internet while U.S. citizens are effectively banned from watching Doctor Who, Planet Earth and all the other great BBC-produced content. But maybe not for much longer.

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