AP finally runs a story on cell-phone videos transforming news, but misses big piece
When Michael Richards made headlines for a racially-charged rant while on stage, I thought the most interesting part of the story was how it came out. I guess with the leak of video showing the Saddam hanging, AP decided to finally run this story.
While I’m glad that a story was written, I think the writer totally missed a huge part of the story. The biggest contributing factor in user-captured video was YouTube. YouTube – and other services like it, including Metacafe and Google Video – have enabled average citizens to take something they captured and immediately post it online for all the world to see. He said that user video “didn’t gain significant acceptance in the United States until Sprint introduced a popular service”. That’s crazy. No one would care about paying for that service if there were no places like YouTube to post it.