Live Internet Television

Here’s a super-fun way to watch YouTube videos: YooouuuTuuube. Enter a YouTube video URL and watch the video individual frames in a moving mosaic. It’s especially fun with music video which have a lot of color, movement, and changes in imagery. I started with Lily Allen.

Silicon Alley Insider reports today that Google is redesigning You Tube to look a lot more like Hulu. My first response? It’s about time!

I have always found the YouTube interface to be repellent. It has never seemed so much stripped-down and simple (a la craigslist, Google, etc.) as amateurish. And perhaps, as it popularized user-generated content, that feel was a plus.

As it moves into legal professional content, however, and throws in-stream ads at its viewers for the first time, the hacked-together interface fast becomes a liability even for a pioneering giant like YouTube. The professional content paradigm demands a slick, sleek, sexy, and easy-to-use interface.

Like the makeover subjects on TLC’s What Not To Wear, YouTube will lose a lot of its funky and organic personality, but it will align better with its commercial ambitions and potential.

Update: As always, NewTeeVee has great commentary, raises great questions about the deeper implications of this makeover.

I was pretty sure that despite the buzz, and despite having loved the SNL classic about something in a box, I didn’t need to be the 8,425,632nd person to watch the latest video from Andy Samberg/thelonelyisland.

I got roped into it by Kara Swisher’s post “Finally, Original Online Video Done Right: Andy Samberg’s Lonely Island and “The Guild” on WSJ’s All Things Digital, though.

This post about professionally-concepted and produced online-only television-like content featured some references to a Microsoft online mini-episode series as well as something called The ‘Bu.

Regrettably, I looked at the Microsoft series first. Knee-jerk Microsoft bashing is boring, but I have to say, it happens for a reason. The episode and Christmas Special were stilted, predictable, and featured a single effective actor. Add some really bad-looking graphics and amateurish cartoon character representations and you have a whole lotta mess.

Contrast that with The ‘Bu — “young, sexy people that live in Malibu call it The ‘Bu, because when you say the entire word, it takes time, and then you wouldn’t be young anymore.” It’s a spoof of Melrose Place and hey! I lived by that show back in the day.

8 episodes in all were produced in January 2006, just about 3 years ago (Swisher didn’t mention that!). The comments are still rolling in (for Episode 1 as recently as 3 hours ago), and this week have mostly featured references to… the latest video from Andy Samburg/thelonelyisland seen so far by 8,425,631 people.

Make that 8,425,632. I had to watch it. And I might have to watch the CW remake of Melrose Place!