Apple announced its earnings, and one thing stands out in the company's press release to me, as someone who is fascinated by the rapidly evolving fusion between TV/video and the Web:

 (There have been ) 8 million videos sold since their introduction in October 2005.

The scary thing about that number is that it’s “backloaded,” in that my guess is that the largest proportion of those were sold later in the cycle than earlier. The selection, of course, has grown meaning more choices, more downloaded.

I have to wonder with the seamless link between the store and video iPod (which again saved my life on a 3 hour 41 minute flight) can anyone catch Apple? At this point, Apple has such a huge lead (and my guess is there is more great content to come), so the race might be for second place.

There’s a growing problem with all the video communities (Youtube, vSocial, etc..). Those who upload videos to the communities do not understand that offering a 10 second clip of “Family Guy,” some obscure European TV commercial or 20 seconds of their favorite “SNL” bit is NOT consumer generated content. It is consumer ripped off content. I find it frustrating when so many consumer creators are trying to use these communities as a venue to experiment with video and test this exciting medium. At some point, TV networks will figure out a way for consumers to license clips of TV shows for creative purposes, but we're not there now.

For a second, let’s overlook the fact that ripping off commercial TV is illegal. More important, it’s boring. VERY BORING. I implore these communities to start taking these clips off their sites and/or institute filters that find and delete them. Actually, one of the better things about Google’s video upload service, is that they attempt to nuke these ripped off clips before they make their way to the Google video search index. Sometimes, the filter is on too strong and legit stuff gets nuked, but that’s OK.

If I want to watch “Family Guy,” I’ll tune to Fox; that’s where it belongs. NOT on the video community sites.