'Video-snacking'

Short, lightweight, tightly shot – maybe the McDonald's of TV programming, or moving eyecandy. That may be what TV on cellphones will look like. At least, the $64,000 (or $64 million?) question conventional TV programmers are looking at right now is how to do their thing on teeny screens and make money in the process. So far, "there are only about 3 million people out of the almost 200 million cellphone users in the United States who now watch video on their phones," the New York Times Magazine reports, but everybody knows that's changing fast, and video-enabled cellphones are already ubiquitous in Europe and Asia (with shows like the UK's "SeeMeTV"). The Times took an in-depth look, particularly at MTV's thinking and development process. MTV may be "most likely to succeed," as the youngest of the lot (at 25), but of course it's looking over its shoulder at young but popular "TV" aggregators like YouTube.com and Heavy.com (the other hot story these days, beginning to nudge aside social-networking). The thing that's interesting, here, is that - while TV producers are watching the competition to see how it does programming for mobile TV - they also need to watch what "regular people" (aka teen homemade video producers) are creating for YouTube.com and other video-sharing (or social-producing or media-networking!) sites. The kind of programming that results will probably be a lot more like the "video snacking" some observers are calling it. The Times says MTV looked at some of the competition's European programming, at best crude and in some cases downright pornographic, and knew it'd have to do something a little different – so far it's pretty much talking heads in the music world. It'll be interesting to see how PBS does mobile TV!

In other video-of-the-people news, Yahoo looks to be pointedly taking on YouTube and maybe going one better with "Yahoo! Studio," where "everyone can feature their work alongside some of the most well-known names in television and movies … share a single video, or create a whole channel full of your work and be discovered by like-minded, artists, businesses, and fans," says Yahoo. "We'll be watching!" The San Jose Mercury News reports on this. See also the BBC on "viral video" – looking specifically at YouTube.com, Break.com, and GetDemocracy.com, and how do-it-yourself video on the Web is taking off. And the San Jose Mercury News earlier in the week looked anecdotally at how teens and 20-somethings are using YouTube (as both consumers and producers).