Post-Taiwan Earthquake, all i’m seeing from YouTube is a blank black screen here in Singapore. All the dollars poured into marketing videos and sharing of personal videos has come to a screaming halt with the disruption of any of the undersea links.

“…Mark: I’m sure not very many. Not enough people are aware of Current.tv and to them YouTube is the future. Not a service that already exists…”

That’s my point. Current.tv is currently the closest thing to YT on traditional tv that we have today, and there’s no buzz, no excitement, no viewership over the potential of the future.

I think all of us have the capability to see something (a movement / fad) in early development and “know” that there’s something there in that idea to latch onto, to build on.

Current.tv — no one’s latching on
Webtv — no one latched on

Local access channels broadcast similar shows (in format) to RocketBoom and ZeFrank all day long, and there’s all kinds of network tv showing the funniest home videos of amateurs all day long.

There’s very few folks latching on to those as well.

Aside from the current level of apparent disinterest, there’s a huge hurdle for YT to overcome when the HDTV broadcast standard rolls around for everyone in 2009(?)

Where I see a real potential is in the functionality of a time-based tag such as Viddler (which 9Ruler, Chris Tingom had a big part of the development of) has to offer.

Now, if I could watch tv and immediately skip to the interesting parts, as determined by my community, with comments based on those tags and not — “great video, thanks for uploading” and “you suck for uploading this”, then we might be getting somewhere.

Mark: I’m sure not very many. Not enough people are aware of Current.tv and to them YouTube is the future. Not a service that already exists.

Justin: It definitely presents a problem.