Sites such as Twitter have always had question marks hanging over them from the web community. Until they get taken under the wing of a bigger company who could use the technology or user information, how are they going to be able to keep running without generating large sums of income?

Due to the nature of the content on the site, YouTube needs to be able to make money more than most due to its storage and bandwidth needs alone. YouTube have claimed that 20 hours of video is uploaded a minute and it is believed that over 10 billion videos are streamed on the site (Just to quantify that number – it would take around 500 hundred years for a person to count to 10 billion!).

With this in mind YouTube need to start making some serious revenue and they have just announced that they are to offer a rental service for some videos. Initially there will be five videos available to rent but only to users in the USA. The films are going to be from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance festivals and most will be charged at £2.50 for a 48hr rental.

Content creators wanting to charge for the rental of their videos/films on YouTube will be able decide how much to charge, with YouTube taking a cut. It is an interesting development and we will know more when the service is initially launched on the 22nd January.

As web developers we focus a lot on accessibility and usability. This story made me realise, that as web technologies have progressed (explosion of video, music sharing etc.), accessibility has struggled to keep up with it. Sites like YouTube effectively offer content that is predominately inaccessible by deaf users and that is obviously a major problem (I must point out that they have used captions for a while but users have to physically add them).

From our technical vantage point this is also an interesting development as processing speed will undoubtedly be an issue, it will be very interesting to see how quick and ultimately how usable it is. As with all accessibility measures that are put in place it also helps a much wider audience. Consider a user who doesn’t have access to sound or can’t hear it – mobile users in a crowded public place for example.

The solution was devised by a Google employee who is deaf himself. I think that acts as a reminder that it is usually possible to make things accessible and no amount of excuses or barriers will change that!

Update 25/11/09:

Thinking back to my dissertation, one of the major problems with video on the web was that of indexing and searching. Extracting content from video has always been difficult due to the amount of information stored in every frame. This technology could help this process as it enables speech in the video to be extracted and stored without taking up a lot of room. This means it is then searchable. Watch this space.