When Atom Films relaunches today, it will be a playground for aspiring video producers hoping for the next big Comedy Central or Spike TV hit. When iFilm relaunched a month ago as a more accessible, more open video portal, it was loaded with clips of “The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart and his Comedy Central cohorts.
Viacom, the owner of Facebook.com, is moving into the online video networking sector of the web too. With the recent purchase of YouTube.com by Google, Viacom didn’t want to miss out on anything.
So there’s a lot of video content online — I mean, A LOT of video content now. There are terrabytes among terrabytes of video files online now. This big boom only started in the last 12 months. I don’t think YouTube.com is even 12 months old yet actually. Oops, I just checked, it launched in February of 2005 — so just under two years old.
A lot of content online is adult related content, home videos of people, people tyring to get famous, and just random clips. A decent amount of that content is comedy related, but there is not a huge sector for it yet.
That’s exactly what Viacom is aiming to dig into; the comedy sector. Viacom wants to come out and be the king of content for the “funny realm.”
Google Video & YouTube.com don’t have a specific niche for this — while they do have categories — they are not focused on this kind of niche specifically. Viacom is aiming to monetize on this “need” in hopes it will provide the trafifc they want.
