Definitely mixed feelings about YouTube for me. To an amazing degree, it has realized the potential to find any thinkable fragment of video – and I think sometimes the 2-5 minute excerpt is not only the most convenient form of consumption but also a better form altogether. Entertainment value can transcend “size,” at least in this arena, and I believe that people will come back to the low-quality version of that one SNL sketch that was funny versus watching the whole show in high-definition.
From a content producer’s perspective however, it seems like we’ve traded a distribution problem for an “attribution” problem. A phenomenon I’ve seen repeatedly is multiple YouTube accounts posting the same clip with little or no modifications. Or re-encoding a non-YouTube video and posting it there. So now in many cases it isn’t so much getting people to see one’s work as much as it is trying to convince people that one is the original producer of that work. Or creating a large enough incentive for people to go somewhere besides YouTube for video or video-related material.
Consumers of the clips don’t care, of course.