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This is nothing new to those of us who don’t watch much TV anyway but spend hours on Youtube/ Daily Motion catching the latest Jap anime like Bleach, Death Note, Naruto or American TV drama like LOST, Heroes. Youtube is the new Napster or Kazaa or whatever you call it. The days of the TV locking us in with their millitant and rigid programming schedules are over. And if TV execs will stop sueing poor folks like us, they should wise up to the new realities of internet media.

Because Internet is simply the way to go for video entertainment. The slower the TV execs realize this the better for all of us. More regular Joes and Janes like us can have a shot at stardom and infamy on the web. Think LonelyGirl15 from Youtube (pic above) and the Backdorm Boys from China (who spoofed the Backstreet Boys on their way to fame, and even had their own merchandise).

Secondly, we have a shot at earning money from our less professionally but more engaging content before the suits and corporate fatcats gobble us up with their well oiled business machinery.

Amateur Content: The New Black

Have you heard of DiggNation? The cult favorite video series among the 18-34 geek audience that features Kevin Rose of Digg.com fame . Here’s what Business 2.0 has to say about it:

(A) packed trade-show audience of more than 700, peering up at the makeshift stage, cheers wildly for the start of the main act: Digg’s 30-year-old founder Rose and his spike-haired sidekick Albrecht, slouched on a couch, sipping beers, and staring down at laptops between their knees. A lone videocamera records the action…

… By the end of the taping - held at the recent Macworld show in San Francisco - dozens of tech fanboys rush the stage as the co-hosts toss out bumper stickers and T-shirts. Nearly an hour later, Rose and Albrecht are still posing for cell-phone pictures with fans.

Diggnation is no wimp in the money and viewership stakes too.

Just a year and a half out of the gate, Diggnation draws about 250,000 viewers a week and is among the most popular free video podcasts on Apple’s iTunes service - alongside offerings from ABC, the BBC, and CNN (which, along with Business 2.0 and CNNMoney.com, is owned by Time Warner (Charts)). It’s also making some decent coin: The show has had 15 sponsors thus far, each paying as much as $10,000 per episode.

A single guy manning the videocam. Can you believe what TV execs in the ’90s or ’80s will say when they hear of this? Today’s execs can only shake their heads and despair. Yea.. =D Amateur content rocks and is in fashion!

If you never heard of Diggnation, then there’s the notoriously popular “Lonelygirl15″ too, starring a real actress (American-New Zealander Jessica Rose) as a fictional angst-sy 17-year-old teen. Lonelygirl15 was so popular on Youtube that it spurred an online investigation by its fans for the real identity of this teen. When the facts were finally out, New York Times felt it worthy of their coverage. Jessica Rose, instead of suffering from the “witch-hunt”, went onto a role with United Nations and will also star along Lindsay Lohan in an upcoming movie. If you ignore the fact Lonelygirl15 was produced by a good backend team of producers, what a massive ego boost to any webcam-toting teeny-bopper around the world!

From Reel-life “Desperate Housewives” to Real-life “Desperate Advertisers”

(Marketers) want to get in front of video watchers and Web publishers that want their money. U.S. online video ad expenditures are expected to total $775 million in 2007, up 89% from last year, according to market research firm eMarketer. But that’s still only about 4% of projected total U.S. online ad spending of $19.5 billion. To increase that number, the industry may need to figure out a new way to advertise. (Via Forbes)

There is a huge pressure for advertisers to reach out to the expanding and highly loyal audiences watching all these online videos on the video-sharing sites. Whether its amateurish stuff like LonelyGirl15, Rocketboom or DiggNation, or professional and “stolen” copyrighted content like LOST, advertisers want IN.

While inserting video ads alongside such video content appears to be an intuitive solution, advertisers, content producers and channel owners have their own mind demons to overcome. The wide range of media formats make advertisers sceptical of appropriate brand depictions and scaling of their messages across the mass audience. Measurement metrics are also immature to track such a new form of advertising. Content producers who produce good content worthy of monetization are in short supply and its currently hard to band them together to create a large enough media inventory for advertisers. As for channel owners, the jury is still out on whether major video sharing sites like Youtube, MetaCafe, Daily Motion, Veoh can fight off the legal vultures circling the laissez-faire uploading culture of their young user bases.

Its like fighting a guerilla war sometimes as you watch Youtube take down copyrighted content as soon as the young renegade uploaders wage their pocket raids and provide the latest shows to serve the expectant viewers (like myself).

What’s in it for all of us?

Get out that webcam, line up your prettiest friends in front of it and a few good men who know their videos and lighting behind it… Then, upload on Youtube/ MySpace and then watch that money roll in..

TV might not be dead, but it sure hurts for a while while the Youtube stars revel in the limelight.