Rocketboom’s Andrew Michael Baron has an interesting post at his personal site about the huge interest in creating Internet video platforms. Baron name checks Open Media Network, Current.tv, Akimbo, AT&T Homezone, Brightcove, Innertube and others, asking “Why are these always going wrong or why are they not going better?”

There are some good reasons why, and Baron lists ten of them:

Ten Reasons Why Internet Video Platforms Fail:

1. Insubstantial library of content
2. Poor bit rates
3. Lack of innovation (clone platform)
4. No share in content ownership rights
5. No exclusivity of content distribution
6. Lack of spark/spirit for a centralized community
7. Need for users to d/l proprietary software
8. Awkward interface design
9. Overly excessive emphasis on rights protection
10. Lack of technological foresight & audience expectations

An underlying issue that Internet media networks have to overcome is that technology is driving the cost of producing & distributing Internet video down to almost nothing. This means that there’s little to tie content producers, like Baron, to any video platform.

What Baron doesn’t address is why some Internet video platforms, like YouTube, succeed. YouTube dominates Internet video, despite having many of the problems Baron cites (poor bit rates, no exclusivity of content distribution, awkward interface design.)

YouTube’s success in capturing people’s attention demonstrates that, while there are many ways for an Internet video platform to fail, there’s still tremendous opportunity for video platforms to succeed.