You SURE You Want Your YouTube?

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July 28, 2006

What do the numbers 65,000, 20 million and 2.5 billion represent? They're the numbers, respectively, of new video uploads per day, unique visitors per month and video views per month on YouTube as of June. And they're growing quickly. But the YouTube phenomenon is not just about new technology--it's about momentum. "The problem with any work of creativity is finding an audience," says Greg Kostello, CEO of vMix Media, one of several public video-service start-ups. "The Internet and the Web have a history of taking people's creative works and making them available to the world."

Indeed, everyone I know has watched at least a few videos on YouTube. My wife, my daughter, my 80-year-old mom, doctors, lawyers, CEOs ... even Bill Gates, speaking at The Wall Street Journal's "D" conference (d.wsj. com/ index. html), said he watches videos on YouTube. And it's not only YouTube. MSN, Google Video, Yahoo, the new AOL Uncut, vMix and others offer similar services. And consumer demand for such services is fueling growth in the private video-sharing market as well, as some users prefer to post their homemade videos on less widely viewed sites.

It's On Your Network

What does all this have to do with enterprise IT networking? Everything! Those are your users watching other people's videos on your network. And content gets added to these sites faster than it can possibly be policed, which means inappropriate and illegal content is uploaded far more rapidly than it can be identified and removed. In fact, some of the most popular clips on YouTube are copyright-violating excerpts from TV shows or DVDs, and sites like PeekVid and The Best of YouTube are external indexes that point primarily to copyrighted content. We've all heard about the liability issues related to porn on corporate networks. And if copyrighted material is downloaded to your network and subsequently uploaded by an employee, the Motion Picture Association of America can come after the entity that owns the source IP address at the time of upload--likely an IP address from the NAT pool on your corporate gateway, which makes you that entity.

Another way videos impact your network is how easy it is to create them. More than half of all mobile phones shipped this year will be camera phones, according to IC Insights. And employees often bring their personal cell phones to the office and create short videos for amusement--do a simple search and you'll find thousands of such videos on YouTube. What happens when one of these employees inadvertently captures a co-worker in the background in an embarrassing position and posts the file to the Web, and the co-worker sues the company? Or when confidential corporate documents, diagrams or conversations are unintentionally revealed?

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