Everyone’s Gunning For YouTube

The focus and experimentation on IPTV is switching away from watching short clips on YouTube to watching full length shows on downloadable TV applications like Joost, Babelgum, Veoh TV , Netflix (which now has a Silverlight application) and others. YouTube continues to grow, but people are not looking to find full length TV shows there.

That isn’t stopping the competitors from trying to get a piece of the action, though.

YouTube has a slew of direct competitors, but the network effect kicked in long ago for YouTube and its unlikely that loose copyright policies or higher quality videos are going to make any kind of dent in their market share. But the networks are still goggling that $1.65 billion price tag for YouTube, and they want their pound of flesh.

Competitors Running In Circles

Hitwise published some statistics earlier this week showing that YouTube has 60% market share of the U.S. video sharing sites - they have more visitors than all of their competitors combined. They continue to grow at a fast clip even after the networks started massive litigation against them.

Comscore worldwide data is nearly identical, showing YouTube with a 66% market share. See the chart to the left for the side-by-side numbers.

It’s clear that the market is probably big enough for a few competitors to be successful, but no one is knocking YouTube off the thrown any time soon.