Bus Uncle: Sign of the Next CNN

The WSJ today had one of those amazing page 1 stories on a global sociological trend: The Hong Kong video sensation called Bus Uncle available at YouTube.

Goes like this:

• Man asks fell bus passenger to hold down his cell phone conversation because it is disturbing others;
• Loud-talker aka 'Bus Uncle,' shouts, threatens and curses for 6 minutes;
• Other bus passenger records it all on video cell phone and posts to web;
• 5 million downloads later, 'Bus Uncle' is a star with dozens of related videos of his arrest, talk show appearances, multi-language versions etc...
• Buy the T-shirt!...Listen to the Rap music version... or look at dozens of spinoffs.

What's going on?

• Every cell phone user can be a broadcaster;
• Consumers are seeking out their own customized entertainment and information from new web services;
• No cable-TV or broadcast network gets a nickel from the transaction;
• No advertiser gets heard;

We are watching the creation of a new, consumer-led market disruption of media, as outlined by Francis McInerney (every home a TV station) back in 1998. Media watcher Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine calls it the explosion of TV.

Broadband observer Om Malik charts the rise of YouTube, one of the new and fast rising free video services with a great snapshot of its acclerating internet market share.

By mainstream media standards, Bus Uncle's rapid rise makes no sense.  It meets few of the traditional criteria of broadcast media in that it is not news, it has no celebrities and it is not scripted.  What do these amateur videos have?  Immediacy; drama; relevance to normal lives; social commentary; universality. 

VC dude Paul Kedrosky has some notes to self on the phenomena which he says could turn big.

This reminds me of the early days of CNN, which the big three broadcasters dismissed as 'Chicken Noodle News' when it launched in 1980 because it, too, looked all wrong at the time: Based in Atlanta (not NY or Washington); low-budget; repetitive; no star newsreaders.  It took Wolf Blitzer's live reports from Baghdad during the first Gulf War for mainstream viewers and media to value what CNN did have: immediacy and global intake. Live, world-changing events, 724.

YouTube, Rocketboom and other consumer-led video services offer immediacy and relevance to millions of consumers globally, but on their own terms.

**Other Views**

View from a Macau resident who says Bus Uncle is more popular than DaVinci Code.

PBS's MediaShift blog interviews one of the founders of YouTube.

Mathew Ingram, who is a tech sceptic by nature, says YouTube seems to have something substantial to offer consumers and that rival media companies should stop trying to kill it through the courts.

Comments

[Bill Thompson]

I'm tempted to see the occasional prominence assigned to a recording like this as a sign that things are changing, but the end point is far from clear.

As we can see from EPIC 2014,

http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/

there are various different outcomes, one of which is that the big media companies simply use whatever people provide as raw material, commoditize it and, by providing search tools, indexing and so on end up enhancing and consolidating their brands rather than opening up a new era of democratic participation.

So consumer-led video services, as you call them, might just be a transitional stage, the place where people discover that they can post their own video content, and a prompt to the larger players to take this seriously and annex the creative output for themselves. After all, newspapers like The Guardian ae now using blogs as a talent competition :-)

[BusUncleVideo.com]

The original and funniest version can be seen at http://www.busunclevideo.com. No intro ads, full sized!

[Nathan Rudyk]

Many more Bus Uncles to come ... check out the way disruptive pocketcaster software demo from Vancouver's ComVu Mobile Media:

http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2005fall/55006.html

Think Olympics coverage. Same-old-same-old bland network coverage, or coverage with unique points of view (the gymnast's mom, the basketball coach on the bench, the mega-fan with decades of obsessive knowledge on high-jump) from hundreds of pocketcasters?

And for an art-school sideroad on this topic, try watching the weblog death of Kevin Kurtz at:

http://33whitehall.video.blip.tv/uploadedFiles/KevinKrutz-DeathOfKevinKrutz778.mov

- Nathan Rudyk, www.market2world.com

[Jeff Fan]

YouTube, BitTorrent and other bandwidth hogs I think will continue to create network management issues for broadband carriers. And like it or not, the costs will likely be passed on or shared with users and/or content providers. Metered broadband is inevitable. I came across an article recently that AT&T is now looking to deploy OC-768 in their long haul network on certain routes...looks like the bandwidth demand may have finally caught up to the supply...

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=96564&site=globalcomm

[Zack Urlocker]

Youtube has become a huge phenomena. But its not yet clear whether they know how to run it and make money. Their bandwidth costs are estimated to be around $1 million per month! So they better figure it out soon. Still, my guess is they will figure it out sooner or later; new advertizers are going to throw money at them to reach the demographic they have a lock on.

--Zack
Also there's no comparison between Bus Uncle and Da Vinci code. Bus uncle has much better acting!