Video Planet

As we go to press, Google is threatening to sign a $1.65 billion deal for YouTube, turning the video sharing site into an establishment player, never again to be quite the same renegade user-created phenom it once was. This, even as Google discovers it was doing too much for users and trying to refine its product offerings. Maybe “refine” is now the wrong word. Earlier this month, Sony paid about $65 million for Grouper, as entertainment for and by the masses spreads with viral vigor right into corporate America.

Meanwhile, back in the world of production values and content that costs serious money to produce, the downloadable dance continues to step on its own feet. Steve Jobs in his interesting — but conflict-of-interest — role as Disney board member persuaded Disney — and only Disney — to offer downloadable versions of new releases on the iTunes store, at something like $15 a pop. If it doesn't save consumers money, it at least saves them gas and/or Amazon shipping, as well as the tedium of ripping the DVD to their hard drive and finding some place to store the eminently breakable jewel case and hopelessly scratchable disc (I have a prim 4-year-old girl; what if I had boys?).

Also in DVD news, Target president Gregg Steinhafel got a bit aggro over the whole idea of downloadable titles that might be more affordable than the breakable/scratchable DVDs he stocks by the millions in his stores, threatening to lose interest in marketing that part of his product line. And for more on digital distribution of costly content, see ESPN's decision to stop trying to compete with text messages, as the sports giant abandoned its content-to-cell phones initiative.

So the dispatches from the world of consumer and studio content are pretty much what you would expect from a revolution-in-progress. Messy. But what of business-to-business? And what of democratic institutions that are also businesses (if that's not an oxymoron) — such as newspapers. Here in a world where 100,000 eyeballs is a lot, one of the more interesting possibilities of the video land grab begins to take shape. In this month's cover story (p. 42), we talk to Richard Koci Hernandez, a San Jose Mercury News photojournalist who taught himself and his colleagues to be a web channel, building mercurynewsphoto.com in defiance of unhelpful Knight Ridder management. Knight Ridder eventually gave Hernandez, his colleagues, and his site grudging respect; new owner Dean Singleton already gets the potential gain (and peril) of the print-web equation.

This aspect of the Internet has the potential to be really new — maybe not spectacularly or glamorously or grossoutly so — but new in a more practical way. So far we've mostly seen old guard studios and new guard rebels grabbing up video real estate. What will professionals who have hard-won skills in non-Internet/non-entertainment disciplines bring to the landscape? Maybe the meek will inherit the Internet.