The money is in niche sites; instead of trying to cater to every demographic, cater to specific niches.
Suddenly, your ads are worth far, far more, and furthermore you can build an actual community based on specific interests rather than lumping everyone together.
I predict that over the next 5 years or so, online video will branch out to create an enormous "long tail" of niche sites that massively out-traffic the top few (Youtube, etc).
Also, I don't think bandwidth is as big a problem as people make it out to be. Sure, if you pull a Stage6 and solve quality problems by simply letting everyone use bitrates as high as 18 megabits, you'll run out of cash fast. But with modern H.264 video, 500 kilobits is plenty for web-quality SD video.
what needs to be created is a bit-torrent type affair for people to consume video over the internet, such that users logged into a network (let's say youtube) download and also share the videos they consume.
this will reduce the overall bandwidth cost for the service a ton. plus it reinforces a community of sharing, people actively downloading and hosting/seeding the videos they enjoy. give premium access to the users that host/seed more.
Suddenly, your ads are worth far, far more, and furthermore you can build an actual community based on specific interests rather than lumping everyone together.
I predict that over the next 5 years or so, online video will branch out to create an enormous "long tail" of niche sites that massively out-traffic the top few (Youtube, etc).
Also, I don't think bandwidth is as big a problem as people make it out to be. Sure, if you pull a Stage6 and solve quality problems by simply letting everyone use bitrates as high as 18 megabits, you'll run out of cash fast. But with modern H.264 video, 500 kilobits is plenty for web-quality SD video.