YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley spoke yesterday at MIPCOM, an international media conference.

Highlights of his speech:

There was a time when a centralized distribution model was relevant and effective. But if you listen to your audience; if you hear what they are telling you; you will understand that the days of the centralized distribution hub are ending.

Your audience – today’s consumers – want access to content on PCs, TVs, mobile phones and social networking pages. And contrary to what some believe, the internet doesn’t take viewers away from traditional broadcast. As the President of NBC Research told the New York Times a few months back: “The Internet hardly cannibalizes; it actually fuels interest.”

In fact, reacting to a recent Forrester study focused on engaged viewers of online video, executives from ABC, CBS and MTV all agreed that online video was adding to their total viewership rather than taking away from it.

So the question before you today is: do you circle ranks and push back against the surge of change? Or, do you open yourselves to the promise and possibilities of globalized content everywhere at anytime on any device?

Hurley also shared some interesting facts:

 

• Around 10 billion videos are viewed monthly online in the U.S. alone
• On YouTube 13 hours of content are uploaded every minute
• The number of people consuming video on their PCs is higher than ever before
• In France over 120 million hours of video content is watched per month while over 3 million mobile phone subscribers use their phone to view a video
• The online video advertising market is set to be worth over a billion dollars by 2010, will reach over $3 billion by 2012, and over $5 billion by 2013

While Hurley’s speech targets mainstream media content creators, he makes a compelling case that Internet video is where television was in 1941 – the nascent future of media. 

via TechCrunch