current.tv is is like youtube in the way that flickr is like photobucket. It may not ever compete on volume, but will surely compete on quality, revenue and recruiting Social Media Talent.

Current.tv is like “project greenlight”, it encourages video submissions that the community votes on. In fact the community can “greenlight” projects as part of the voting mechanism, and because current.tv is actually a TV channel, it has an avenue to broadcast the best and the brightest. Oh and guess what, people get paid.

What current.tv has done is probably the model that every channel, that creates original content could benefit from, in addition to it’s normal development process. I can’t imagine a more cost effective sandbox for television content. I wouldn’t be surprised if the concept of a broadcast TV pilot just moves to a social video platform. IMHO this would have been a much better model for Fox Atomic

Current.tv is not a free for all, and it provides guidelines around what it’s looking for from the community. It asks for short stories called “pods”, Mobile video, Viewer Created Ads, and Promo Spots.

As i’ve said before the content will follow the money, but how about the talent will follow the opportunity? Sure some folks will manage to make a career out of youtube, with it’s massive audience, but with 65,000 videos uploaded a day, how do you rise above the noise? If you are creating something artistic, thoughtful, thought provoking, where is the outlet for that? Maybe not YouTube?

Current.tv seems to be more of a patron of the arts, a steward if you like, sure they get great content for their TV channel, but they are also encouraging story telling.

Tip of the Hat: Myphonerocks.com

BTW Jaffe has an interesting conversation going on on JaffeJuice called Why YouTube Imitators will fail. My response is, youtube imitators will fail as long as the continue to “imitate” and not innovate. YouTube has pioneered a model of social media that no-one has figured out how to capitalize on, not even YouTube.

A very funny and extensive interview with Steven Colbert.

Man I loves me some robot chicken and yet, for all its indie feel the site still feels like something produced for the WB. Take the Robot Chicken vlog, a collection of window media files (not working when I went there) on a flash page, not comments, no trackback, not really a vlog guys. Seriously, i would love these guys to get into social media where they would be totally embraced as rock stars. C’mon guys, we love the work, there is a community of creative people out there that you can engage with and create even bigger fans than you already have.

This one is another good entry to the NBC office promo

So far they’ve got:
Videos: 97
Members: 1379