Amateur video sharing grows online

updated 9:21 a.m. ET Jan. 23, 2006

NEW YORK - Over the past year, Janelle Gunther occasionally captured video with her Canon PowerShot digital camera: An elephant parading through city streets to the Ringling Bros. circus, her friends on stage during an improv dance show.

But the clips simply sat on her computer unwatched — until last weekend, when she began adding them to Vimeo, one of several sites to emerge for sharing amateur footage.

There's no shortage of sites willing to accept such video, and once issues of revenues, copyright and ease of use get sorted out, the sharing of personal video promises to become as commonplace as photo-sharing is today.

"For the past six months or so, a lot of these sites have been popping up," said Jakob Lodwick, Vimeo's founder. "It went from being none to there being new ones every couple of weeks."

Credit the digital video revolution.

Most digital cameras sold since 2004 can shoot video, and so can newer models of cellular phones, said Jill Aldort, an InfoTrends consultant who specializes in Internet imaging trends. CVS Corp. even sells disposable video cameras.

"People have video all over the place, coming out of their ears," said Cynthia Francis, chief executive of Reality Digital Inc., which runs the ClipShack sharing site.  "People are looking for a way to share that."

Now they needn't necessarily burn DVDs or carry around cameras to show friends their latest video oeuvre.  Thanks to faster Internet connections and better online video technology, even search engine leader Google Inc. is getting into the game.

Now that it's easier to reach her audience, Gunther expects to shoot even more video, just as she shot 10 times as many photos once she started sharing them on Yahoo Inc.'s Flickr.

"I finally had a place to put them," the 30-year-old architect said of her photos.

YouTube.com, a leading site, had more than 3 million visitors in December, nearly tripling its visitation in November, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. YouTube Inc. says its users have been sharing 20,000 new videos a day and watching some 10 million daily.

One clip on YouTube is of a 12-year-old scoring a touchdown, another is of a woman burping in front of a mirror. One young man captured himself skateboarding on a treadmill.

Others are more carefully produced and edited, even set to music.

Steve Silvestri, a local television news cameraman in Bates City, Mo., began sharing his library of personal videos on Christmas Eve, many featuring his travels on Amtrak.  One clip got more than 10,000 views within two weeks — gaining a wider audience than he did from burning 50 DVDs for family and friends.

"It's the greatest thing since the Internet," Silvestri said.  "Everybody wants to have an audience for their stuff."

Budding filmmakers and musicians can promote themselves, too, but people generally capture everyday moments without ever thinking they'd become Internet sensations, said Chad Hurley, YouTube's co-founder.

Despite the growth, video-sharing remains largely a province of the tech-savvy.

Many people don't know their digital cameras can shoot video or can't be bothered transferring or trimming it.

Though video-sharing is available to higher-end paying subscribers of Smugmug Inc.'s photo service, it's not the main driver, said Chris MacAskill, the company's co-founder.

Photos, on the other hand, can be shared as is and many photo-sharing sites even let users crop, remove "red eye" and perform other minor editing.

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