Good, says I–maybe that means they’ll start leaving their regular content alone!

Look, it’s no secret that ever since Google bought YouTube they’ve been trying frantically to figure out how to monetize the silly thing.  After all, how can you get a cut of a video of some guy jumping off the roof of his house?  And just because it’s got lots of traffic doesn’t mean advertisers are terribly interested, either.  Who really wants their ad to go up alongside the charming thirty second epic “Watch Me Pull Out My Blackheads Part 2“? and just in case you were wondering, yes, that IS a real video.  It’s not for the squeamish, either–you’ve been warned.

But they may finally have something with the idea of turning their mass of traffic into the world’s largest online video store. Jeff describes it really well in his article on the subject located here.

This is awesome, of course, but again, the serious problems come into play, like net access and computer capability.  As long as the massive disparities exist in internet access, speeds, and usage levels exist, you can forget about this ever being much more than a small sideshow for the disc market.

But the framework is being laid, and I do hope to see a day in which any movie you want is available instantly, on demand.