Online video on demand

You can tell your friends you use YouTube and they’ll consider you hip, at least for a month or two. In fact there are hundreds of other splendid online video sites that offer you an exploding universe of video choices.

This is a period like the advent of easily produced Web sites, back in the mid-1990s, say industry-watchers.

Video has become the current rage, and the recent decision by Google to spend $1.65 billion to buy YouTube confirms that someone is certain there’s something to all this activity.

Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst with Global Crown Capital, said that Google’s purchase of YouTube might be seen as a way to keep its competitor Yahoo out of the online video world. He isn’t the only technology analyst seeing hints of excessive, maybe irrational spending taking place in a sector of online activity that is nowhere near profitable.

What’s behind the excitement? Joe Bereta, the 23-year-old Gonzaga University graduate who just signed a deal with NBC to do a pilot script, believes the attraction is “adventure. It’s the challenge of seeking through the crap online and finding the good content.”

Bereta, whose partner is his Gonzaga actor-buddy Luke Barats, knows his career has taken off thanks to YouTube. A number of comic videos the two produced in Spokane became among the Web site’s most popular videos.

In effect they became online stars thanks to the viral marketing that sites like YouTube or MySpace promote. People saw their videos, e-mailed the link to friends, and on it went.

Bereta has the typical view of why YouTube is so appealing: “It’s immediate. This new generation is now used to looking for what they want and finding it quickly. Instead of sitting down at 8 p.m. on Thursday to watch what’s on (TV), you can now click on something you see and if it’s interesting, you watch it,” he said.

If it’s boring, the solution is click and move on.

And not everything that appeals to the YouTube crowd involves short videos about kids doing dumb things or repackaged Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert clips, he said. Longer videos are there too, some as long as a TV feature.

Since leaving GU and getting the deal with NBC, Bereta said he hasn’t had as much time to browse online video as he did a few years ago.

But three sites he visits, in addition to YouTube, are Smosh.com, AskaNinja.com and TheLonelyIsland.com. (Note: not LonelyIsland.com.)