Early adopters, and early majority for online video services are now tapped out. In the following chart we see from 2008 to 2009, the number of unique viewers actually went down by around 2%. Usage rose, but uniques are flat. To take a shopping-mall analogy, sales, and foot traffic are up, but it’s the same people, and the other half of the city is ignoring the mall.

So the question is – are video products well positioned to attract the rest of the audience. And the answer is no. Your grandmother won’t watch TV on the Internet because it’s basically too much work. One could argue that by the time she breached the learning curve, web video as we know it will be an old-form curiosity – like Word Perfect for DOS.

For those companies trying to reach late majority video users, or trying to re-innovate for next-generation video services there are clear opportunities. But, for the short term YouTube has sucked the life out of web video innovation and left it stalled at the click-happy gates of our soon-to-be past.

Short attention span web-television is not the entire story. Reacting to a NYTimes article, MarketingVOX points out, longer form should not be counted out.

At INTV in 2002, and up through our current release on intv.com, Ryan Fields and I believe long form has legs. Back in the day I had an investor tell me with absolute seriousness that people would never watch television on computers. The sad fact is, that guy, like so many business people just did not understand the shifting device marketplace. It’s not television on a computer, it’s a computer controlling a video signal.

Take a look at these two charts. In the first we see, in the aggregate, almost 50% of users watch online video on a separate display device from their primary computer monitor (not including mobile). In the second, note that 70% say they’ll cut cable within 5 years because the programming they want is either only on the net, or is of better quality. These are the trends Ryan and I have been projecting now for a decade. No, we have not made the leap to be as famous as RC Cola, but at least we’re still slugging it out and trying to make a difference.

“So maybe Jackson couldn’t keep the world moving to music, and maybe he did terrible things or maybe he didn’t. But for one long, glorious moment he made the world dance. And he did it like no one ever had or probably ever will.”

– Bill Werde, Billboard Magazine in Remembering Michael Jackson

The text of this speech is here.