I have a thought on YouTube and how they can make money. Why not create YouTube Private where you can use it like Picasa and upload all your family videos with a desktop app where you upload, edit, etc. and then upload it to your YouTube storage place. Charge per Gigabyte of storage and flat bandwidth per month at different tiers.
Sure, you can put videos on Picasa or Flickr but it just isn’t the same experience of the ease of use of YouTube. Also, you could allow YouTube to store multiple versions of your video, like Picasa and Flickr does. First would be the general lower resolution version that is initially displayed and then you could go all the way up to HD. Size wouldn’t matter to YouTube when the user pays for the storage and is charged a monthly bandwidth rate.
If YouTube doesn’t do it then you might see Amazon come up with something like this–they already have the means with S3. Now Amazon just needs to add a video player and YouTube better start to worry. S3 has already become my online hard drive of choice. Also, Amazon has already been creating embeddable videos on their site for products and readers. When do they start to get into the online photo and video market? Maybe the Kindle 3 will be the key.
