Viral video a sinking ship?

While most of us were gearing up to celebrate the holidays, Guba CEO Tom McInerney was cleaning out his desk and heading for home.  Tom's resignation came just a few days after two of Revver's co-founders bolted for the doors, leaving CEO Steven Starr as that company's sole remaining founder.

The departures foreshadow a coming video sharing shake-out, and Guba's McInerney has been very open about his motivations -- he feels that YouTube has already won the big prize, there will be no more billion dollar buy-outs and he would rather not stay at the helm of an also-ran while the video sharing market consolidates in 2007.

I would concede his points but it still sounds like sour grapes to me.  There is no doubt that the coming months will bring a shake-out (users don't need hundreds of places to share videos) but I do think that there is room for more than just one player. It is also too soon to declare GooTube the ultimate winner - they may look like an 800-pound gorilla but I wouldn't discount the possibility of some smarter monkeys shaking up the video space in 2007.

Let's not forget that social media audiences are fickle.  YouTube doesn't "own" their community.  Let's face it, YouTube is good but it isn't great and, since the Google acquisition, it seems to be moving in the wrong direction.  Degradation of the content offering, inappropriate interruptive advertising campaigns and failure to offer prosumer content creators compensation for their contributions are just three factors that could drive users to look elsewhere.

Interestingly enough, solving for the last of these three could mean solving for all three -- a fair compensation scheme would attract higher-quality, web-exclusive content, and better content would make mainstream advertisers more comfortable with paying for deep integrations into the content flow (e.g, actually joining the community vs relying on inorganic safe zones.) 

This equation seems pretty straightforward to me and a number of YouTube competitors -- including Revver and, more recently, Brightcove in partnership with AOL -- are already taking a stab at the compensation issue.  Do you know who doesn't seem focused on solving for this?  YouTube...  So I question why video sharing big wigs would back out so early in the game.