YouTube, It's Better Than T.V.

YouTube, it’s better than T.V.

While I, being technologically uninterested, haven’t really checked out YouTube, many fellow college students such as myself have. Not surprisingly, the love it.

With the quality of television programs decreasing in recent, the price of cable television and associated equipment has become costly, and the rise of internet usage among young people YouTube has become the new T.V. In 2006 teenagers on average spent 26 hours a month on the net according to Pew research.

Those hours were spent watching clips of their favorite shows as a kid, music videos, home videos of people getting hurting, being pranked, etc, artistic videos, like my boyfriend’s favorite YouTube video of a puppet rendition of the Dandy Warhols’ song ‘We Used To Be Friends’ http://youtube.com/watch?v=NgrRRNwj7mU .

Among college students its common to get these tasty little links forwarded to your e-mail box or sent in an instant message because people love the content so much they want to spread it to other people. And that’s where YouTube has T.V. beat. If it’s actually good, watchers advertise it themselves to get viewership. There are no cheesy plots or lame product plugs. You get what you want, and videos produced by independent artists get what they want: an actual audience.

So this brings about a mini revolution. People with actual talent can have their work viewed without getting censored by corporate media. It’s a new frontier, having the viewer decide what gets the most viewing; the people decide what they want to see. The best part, no advertising in the clips you view. No drilling of product names into your head, no ads with stick thin models prancing around, no feeling pressured or inadequate or missing out if you don’t have the latest gadget or product. It’s given people back the control and freedom to connect with the world on their terms.

Do you have to wait until 8:00 to watch something that will crack you up after a long day of drudgery? Nope. Do you have to sit through minutes of commercials? Nope. Can you watch YouTube comfortably on our comfy couch? Unless you have a laptop, being comfortable like you would while watching television is out of the question. That’s really the only drawback to YouTube. It is better content wise, but it has the drawback of being viewable only at your computer.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. With short clips and no commercials, you can spend less time watching YouTube clips than the average person would watching television. You’ll get more content, and more of what you actually want in an hour than you would be watching a standard hour long television program. Add the fact that your computer chair isn’t the comfiest seat in the house and you’ll be sure to not lounge around all day watching YouTube clips like you would with T.V.

YouTube isn’t limited to just the younger generation though, adults are catching on too. A few weekends ago I went to visit my parents, who are in their 50’s, and my dad insisted on showing a YouTube clip of a guy doing donuts in his BMW in Europe who almost gets hit by a bus. He got this from a co-worker while at work. Forget the office romance policy, hello no-YouTube-ing policy. In an office setting this could get tricky, but, that’s for bosses to decide, right?
So there you have it, the good, the good, the good, and the mildly uncomfortable of YouTube. As long as the site stays free and the government doesn’t censor content, especially for the sake of political use of YouTube, I think over all it’s a good step in the right direction of producing content that the public actually wants to watch