On Apple Embracing YouTube

Charlotte Henry:

In terms of getting content in front of as many eyeballs as possible, Apple’s decision then makes perfect sense. However, it is significant in terms of Silicon Valley power politics.

Combine this with Apple’s official channel, which is now home to Apple Music Carpool Karaoke content, and you can see a pattern. Apple has accepted that it has, for the moment at least, completely lost the video platform battle. If it wants to get its video message out, it has to play nicely with Alphabet/Google.

I’d argue that it’s not so much that Apple has lost the video platform battle to YouTube, but that the open web has lost the battle. Apple has never attempted to create a rival service to YouTube. Prior to its embrace of YouTube, what Apple used to do was publish video content on its website, using the HTML5 <video> tag.

There are silos for text content — Facebook, Medium, AMP, Apple News, and more. But none dominate the web. Apple’s own relatively new Newsroom section at apple.com is updated frequently and is just a good old-fashioned blog (although its RSS feed is effectively useless). Still images can still go anywhere on the web. Technically that’s true for video as well, but the discoverability and network effects of YouTube are so strong that practically speaking, it’s the only place anyone puts shareable video content.

★ Monday, 4 December 2017