Some people like to gleefully annoint YouTube as the bastion of original content. It is. And isn’t.

It could be the place to display where the next technological version of Hollywood emerges. While I’m in favor of amateur created videos, watch and share my fair share as well as have been producing my own videos (Hmmcast) regularly since the start of this year, I don’t see any live video sites that TechCrunch mentions in this post making a YouTube-like splash. Why not?

YouTube emerged as a breeding ground for copyright infringement
Miraculously YouTube had enough attention focused on original videos and away from infringing content to persuade Google to buy them instead of meeting the original Napster’s fate. I don’t care how popular YouTube is today, and despite being a shareholder, still strongly believe that the YouTube acquisition has been Google’s biggest strategic blunder to date. If they lose the lawsuit to Viacom and it’s conceivable to believe they might if it makes it to court, this could cost them a lot more than the billion plus they overpaid for YouTube. Courts won’t throw copyright out the window and it’s very difficult for any unbiased third party to objectively analyze the level of copyright infringement at YouTube and say Google is doing everything they can to clear this up.

I know, I know, they are working on it. They are supposed to have some amazing technology that will filter and identify copyright infringing content that rushes in and saves the day and I hope it works. My guess is that it will work about as well as current anti-spam filtering technology.

Back to why there will be no live YouTube video breakthrough site: live video sites aren’t anything new. Historically the only amateur produced live video people have been willing to pay for en masse is adult content and that has been happening at sites like iFriends.com since the late nineties. It’s worth noting that iFriends is more mainstream-focused on their homepage today than they were nearly 10 years ago when they were primarily adult focused. Compare this to Zinio which I wrote about in the last post which has gone the opposite way by being almost anti-adult to creating an entire separate website dedicated to adult magazines.

Popular geeks like Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo and newcomer Justin.TV might be able to garner a few followers to be casually interested, but the whole Ed TV thing has nowhere close to the legs of sharing clips of copyrighted content or low-quality bootlegged camera phone concert videos. People are looking for the good stuff, you know, the stuff you usually have to pay to see.

Napster, anyone?

Besides, there is the issue of what it takes to produce great live video. Takes a lot more than just a camera and a subject. There are some great reasonably priced tools out there that can produce studio-like live effects like Visual Communicator now owned by Adobe, but the vast majority of live video content is going to be as boring as hell. It’s going to be people saying and doing mundane activities with fixed camera shots and backgrounds. Pet rock video.

What will happen with live video in the future?
I think we’ll see the NFL, MLB and NBA directly or with a big name partner — wouldn’t it be ironic if that was YouTube? — offer live sports through the web everywhere (not only outside the United States). They have already begun to experiment and the first one to pull the trigger worldwide will be their own mini YouTube of live video more than any of the sites TechCrunch mentioned. I’m kind of surprised that the three major professional sports haven’t seen the potential here yet.

And when the US Government gets around to legalizing online gambling — and they will, mark my words — we’ll see live internet broadcast sports with the ability to wager. We’ll see interactive commercials that people can experience while watching the event instead of being forced to skip through at some predefined intervals.

Hollywood will finally wise up and start using the internet as a secondary or perhaps even primary distribution channel. A lot of the networks offer TV shows legally on their websites. The decentralization of TV, bring it. People like our family who can and would like to receive the content through the internet legally are ready.

Finally, a third party aggregation site like YouTube isn’t going to have — or likely be given — the rights to make money off the backs of the people producing compelling live content that people are willing to pay for any time soon. The whole notion of ad-supported everything is flawed.

• Share YouTube videos in real time via Test Tube experiment
• Who will click to play video ads from Google or anybody else?
• Google Video uploading temporarily unavailable, blog axed over 45 days ago
• Thief breaks into and falls asleep in SWAT van
• Is Microsoft really to blame?
• Sony pays $65 million for P2P video site Grouper