The online video revolution has taken its time. Like everything in technology, the technical ability to do something proceeds the changes in markets, standards, processes, and consumer behaviours that take something out of the laboratory and into people’s everyday lives.

My own company, CNET, is now a big web publisher, but started off being very focused on producing technology television, (which is perhaps why CNET’s name sounds like a local television company.) The initial investment in US cable content didn’t pan out, but it discovered that there was huge growth in its web properties, such as News.com, and it reinvented itself as an online publisher.

The interesting thing is that now a huge amount of what CNET and other online publishers do involves video, on gaming, music, and technology websites. It’s taken a while for the broadband networks to reach consumers, and people needed more powerful computers to provide the graphics processing power to make streaming online video work. However, that infrastructure is now in place, and consumers also seem to have an inexhaustible appetite for watching videos of people falling over, or kittens behaving amusingly. The success of short-form amateur video clips on sites like YouTube has created a whole new class of video content.

If I look at my own habits as a consumer of online video I can see distinct phases of engagement. Initially it was simply a novelty to be able to chat to someone via a web cam or download a film trailer from the Apple website. However, as with all these technology changes, eventually you stop playing with something because it’s interesting or new, and actually start to use it to achieve something you actually need to get done.

As a journalist it’s become second nature to watch live or streamed versions of press conferences online. As a consumer of news, when a big story breaks where video images are the only way to capture what’s happening, such as the latest appalling gaffe from George Bush at a press conference, I’ll go to my PC to check out the major TV websites to watch short video clips. When someone mentions a new band or a musician that I might like, or I see an intriguing poster on the underground, it’s totally normal to hunt around in Google for a video on YouTube or a band’s home page on MySpace and be able to watch videos of their performance. And when I read about some outrageous new comedian it only takes a second to find some of his or her best work excerpted online, usually for nothing.

None of these experiences is in any way different from the increasingly selective way I use TV at home. As a Virgin cable customer, I check through the programmes stored on my V Plus hard drive to see if there’s anything worth watching. If I can’t find anything there, I might check out some other Virgin service like 4oD or some other catch-up TV offering. And if that fails there are hundreds of films that I can watch via Virgin pay per view. It’s really only as a last resort – a sort of quaint throwback to another era – that I’ll surf the live broadcast channels to find something that’s actually on now.

There’s no question that as a consumer I want to choose the video content I want to watch and decide when I want to watch it. Broadcast just doesn’t do much for me anymore. This may be a particularly male, geek-perspective view on things. My partner really enjoys watching reality shows and awards ceremonies in which part of the fun is the sense that the whole country is watching: they’re shared experiences which get added energy from the sense that millions of other people are viewing them at the same time. Me, not so much.

I’m sure that these great shared experiences, like live sport, aren’t going away. But they are increasingly going to take their place alongside a world in which users, not broadcasters, choose what they want to watch, and when they want to watch it. It might seem odd to see a three minute clip of someone falling off a skateboard as a threat to an expensive period drama like The Tudors. However, the threat to The Tudors isn’t one three-minute clip. It’s the infinite resource of the web, which provides limitless access to free alternative entertainment, and which, with the popularity of wireless networks and laptop computers, is now in the living room, just a few clicks away. And thank goodness, if it means I don’t have to watch anymore of The Tudors.

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.com

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