Good ol’ YouTube. You may be filled with one or two (million) more funny animal videos than is necessary but you’re still phenomenal. Partly because you realize that more than just tech-savvy, English-speaking westerners want to watch videos online.
Territorial Restrictions
There are three things crippling the growth of online video right now: the lack of imagination on the part of Hollywood (see Zediva for an example); the amount of money being charged by content creators to the likes of Netflix and Amazon; a failure to realize that the Internet is a worldwide destination.
The latter of those means that most video content on the Web is available only in certain territories. Being a resident of the U.K. I cannot watch Hulu, for example, and my American friends get the same treatment when it comes to BBC iPlayer.
This makes sense from a financial point of view. But it’s surely an untenable situation as the world becomes a much smaller place and we digest more content over the Internet.
Worldly-Wise YouTube
I would argue that YouTube is leading the way when it comes to realizing the whole world is watching online. YouTube isn’t perfect, of course, and many of its videos are subject to territorial restrictions based on nothing more than geography. Basically those in one country can watch a particular video, those in another country cannot watch it. But it still feels much more like a global site than a lot of the competition.
YouTube is now available in 51 different languages, with IsiZulu and Afrikaans being the most recent additions. According to NewTeeVee, around 60 percent of visitors select a language other than English. Which, with a confirmed 3 billion video views every day means around 1.8 billion are coming from people for whom English is not their first language. Which is an amazing statistic.
Conclusions
Even YouTube needs to try harder on this score, but at least it has a belief built in to the site that people from all around the world will be visiting and should be able to enjoy the content on offer. If only other big-name sites would cotton on to the fact it’s called the World Wide Web for a reason.
