Growing Up on YouTube

My daughters are perhaps among the first who will grow up seeing much more YouTube than POTV (my newly coined acronym, “Plain Old TV.”) Esther, now 2½, has still never seen anything on a television (recorded, broadcast, or cable). (Havi, a week old today, may not have seen anything at all at this point.)

In addition to frequently watching videos from her own blog, Esther loves YouTube. Her most requested videos are embedded below, thanks to the excellent recently-installed Viper’s Video Quicktags.

Thus Esther may never know anything but on-demand and user-generated culture. At least those will be her basic assumptions about how it’s supposed to work. It’s possible that this next generation will spell the end of network-scheduled and traditional advertising-interrupted media. I can never understand why anyone would bother to arrange their schedule to watch a show on TV and sit through commercials when they can rent it from Netflix or buy it from Amazon or iTunes and watch it when and how they want — and I grew up, to some extent, with the old TV model. Esther can barely wait for whichever video she wants now. I can’t see her putting up with content on someone else’s schedule as she grows up.

Now the videos, as promised (both strong indicators that Esther adheres to the Long Tail theory):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UMytSS9hx8[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-dATcjRrkg[/youtube]

Actually, it turns out I didn’t coin POTV. It’s already defined here.

[Tags]Culture, Kids, YouTube, UGC[/Tags]

4 comments

  1. Jamie Oct 28

    I have to say I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. Like Esther, Sasha also only watches videos online and is probably not going to have the patience to sit through entire TV shows once she’s old enough to. The weird thing, though, is that somehow she’s really into Elmo even though she’s never seen Sesame Street on TV. That is one compelling product!

  2. Anonymite Oct 29

    “I can never understand why anyone would bother to arrange their schedule to watch a show on TV and sit through commercials when they can rent it from Netflix or buy it from Amazon or iTunes”

    Err… could that reason be that they can’t afford to, perhaps?

  3. adam Oct 29

    Anonymite: I’m sure cost is an issue for some but not most. Blockbuster has an online rental plan as low as $5.99/month, and Netflix’s cheapest plan is at $4.99/month. Approximately 60% of Americans subscribe to cable, where even the basic plan is more expensive than Netflix, and many subscribe to premier offerings that can easily exceed $100/month. And YouTube, of course, is free.

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