I count the blogs of the employees of Hitwise, Inc. to my first and favourite ressources when it comes to get the buzz of the latest hypes and trends in the website market. With some detail and and a professional data background here insights and findings about changes in website traffic are presented and then analyzed. Lately Lee Ann Prescott, a main researcher there, postet about youtube.com. She found that the traffic to youtube.com was now greater than the traffic to the main TV network websites combined. This news is the kind of buzz out of which most of the Web 2.0 hype is emerging. Although some colleagues and I made comments on the blog of Lee Ann, I want to discuss this here a little bit more in detail.

First this news sounds for the layman like: „TV is now dead, all the people are switching to youtube.com instead of watching TV in the future.“ This, of course, is completely nonsense. Just by finding that youtube.com has videos on it and many people are surfing to their site just don’t say anything about their preference of watching TV. The main point of the study here should be read as that youtube has a more compelling website to offer to the main audience, than the TV networks. But the main business of TV networks is not running websites, it is broadcasting. So this is like comparing -to qoute an old german saying- apples with peaches.

The future of TV may somehow be connected to broadband internet and some aspects of web 2.0, but it won’t be replaced by something like youtube.com. The future of Television is a hometheatrical experience - it is HDTV and surround sound. youtube.com is a place to share funny or disgusting or any other kind of amateurish video. It is also a place where people post their recordings from TV and can comment on them. And it is also a place, where professionals can promote their work by „trailering“ their videos to a global audience. But this is in most cases more self-marketing than broadcasting.

The future of webvideo will definetly change to higher picture and sound quality – definetly it will reach the HDTV/surround sound mark very soon for a broader audience. Videoserver technology seems to be quite ready, but is now waiting for greater bandwidth and a more defined network infrastructure. VideoLAN is a very interesting opensource project, I have constantly an eye on. But my guess is, that you will not see a Youtube with a HDTV streaming service. For many technical and practical reasons I believe more in a scenario, where the user decides to see a special programme and than a software like Freevo or some automated Bittorent clone is downloading this in the background via a peer to peer system.

All this is not really ready for prime time yet, but it will be sooner than some today expect. The interesting thing for a webdesigner is, that those technologies will open new possibilities both in programming and in design of webapplications. I think, this will do for webvideo what the DVD did for consumer homevideo – both in terms of quality and in terms of design: think of the animated menus or games you find nowadays on almost every DVD and remember VHS.