First YouTube Drinks a success

Last night I attended Hamilton’s first ever “YouTube Drinks” at The Baltimore House, an event put on by Michael Canton (@valleytownmedia) to bring together the YouTube community in the city. I’m not much of a YouTube content creator, but I definitely do my fair share of consuming. Online video to me isn’t so much about software or technology itself, but the kind of “synergistic amplification effect” that software can have on other industries. Online video and platforms like YouTube and Vimeo that make it easy to share content allow a diverse set of businesses to expand their reach far beyond what was possible a decade ago. It’s not hard to find examples of this happening in Hamilton already.

For instance Drekken Pownz (@Derkkonis) founded eSports Championship (@eSChamp) which was created to grow, standardize and professionalize eSports in Canada. eSports is about playing video games competitively, and has had much success in South Korea with the game Starcraft. Drekken explains his business in this NewsClipTV video. One component of eSports is broadcasting the live play of the game for fans to watch, just like you would a tennis game or football game. Here’s an example taken from the eSports website:

 

 

Another example of online video in Hamilton comes from Steve Newberry (@NouveauSteve) and his Topic Simple (@TopicSimple) business which creates online animations for your product, idea, business, or startup. You can watch TopicSimple explain itself with its own animated style in the video below:

 

 

Other examples of online video in Hamilton include NewsClipTV (@NewsClipTV1) and BizClipTV. As part of the power of online video I would also include the cover of Somebody That I Used to Know by local band Walk Off The Earth that received 121 million hits on YouTube.

 

 

To me online video is a great example of how software can enable all kinds of other Hamilton-based activities and industries to have a global reach and impact. I can think of a number of bands in the Hamilton-area that deserve 121 million hits on YouTube!

 

 

I hope that this group continues, YouTube meetups are occurring in cities around the world to the benefit of those cities – it would be wonderful to have a similar community in Hamilton.