Yahoo's New Current Channels.

Well - it arrived. (and sooner than i thought it would).

While the
YouTube traffic numbers keep growing... the media din around the arrival of web video has more more people turning from their TV's to the web for short form programming.

And so today we're seeing the first step to filtered, communities of user-generated videos.

The Current/Yahoo deal is interesting on a number of levels. First of all, it's got a bunch of Google/Yahoo/Al Gore intrigue. But i'll leave that for now.
More importantly, Yahoo is trying to figure out how to add editorial value to it's UGV offering.

That's the good news.

The implementation is weird. It's got the Current 'hosts' and branding - way too much graphic packaging and editing that leans too far toward style and away from substance. Some of this is just an MTV hangover. Some of it is old media ideas leaking into new media. The bottom line is that there is a significant difference between push and pull media. And when people click on the "automotive" channel on Yahoo/Current to see videos they don't need to be 'sold' on the topic or presented with zippy graphics and such.

The missing question at Yahoo/Current is the information vs. entertainment quotient.

Current is still living in the TV world - where people need to be lured into pausing their clicker, and then constantly 're-sold' in order to keep them tuned in. But in the new world of web video, that packaging is extraneous, in fact it has the opposite effect. I've told you i want to see your videos- now get me to the content faster, and without host happy talk.

Which isn't to say that Current/Yahoo won't do well. They will. And as they continue to lear from the audience, they'll get real time information about what kinds of videos people want to see (and what they don't). I suspect that this kind of real time information for TV folks who are used to getting unreliable Nielsen ratings (for cable, often not even that) will be quickly addictive.

Yes, i know Current had a web site before - but Yahoo will be a fire-hose of traffic - and the results should be explosive.

Community driven content has arrived. And there will be more - not less - as groups of enthusiasts discover that they can program to each other, and leave the middleman out of the equation.

ps. TechCrunch has a post today refering to the Current conent as "better". Hmmm... not sure that's a very web 2.0 way to look at it.