John Gruber writes about the pitfalls of centralised video in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension:

The big problem is YouTube. With YouTube, Google has a centralized chokehold on video. We need a way that’s as easy and scalable to host video content, independently, as it is for written content. I don’t know what the answer to that is, technically, but we ought to start working on it with urgency.

I’m not sure this is the whole problem. Sure hosting video is one part of the picture, but given the decreasing price of storage and CDNs, I think that’s relatively easy problem to solve.

I think the biggest hurdle is the client. Consider podcasts. In the early days it was difficult to host audio on the web, but certainly possible. But podcasts remained a niche activity as there wasn’t no easy way to subscribe to a feed and just start playing an episode. You’d have to connect your iPod to your machine, run a pod-catcher, wait for it to sync, etc. etc. It’s an activity that one goes out of their way to do. And people did it, back in the day, because they were interests in shows that weren’t being served by the broader media landscape at the time.

But there’s no way podcasts would be as big as they are now if people still had to do this. There are just have too many other options for entertainment, each which requires minimal effort to get started. I believe the introduction of mobile podcast players, with better discovery and much better playback, led to the open podcasting renaissance that we’re enjoying today. The technologies are distributed and open, but the user experiences it like an integrated experience.

Open-web distributed video needs to be much like this. It’s nice to think that at the end of the day, people will open an webpage of their favourite creator, and start playing video in the browser’s — dare I say — bare-bones video player. But that’s never going to happen in a world of YouTube. They’re just going to do what they do every day: which is open YouTube on their mobile or TV, and start viewing video. Sure they may care about certain YouTuber creators, but not enough to change their habits.

That’s what open-web distributed video is up against. Solve the user’s drive to get to video as quick as they possibly can, and I think the rest will sort itself out.