The latest buzz circulating through Web forums has a group of media companies teaming up to develop a YouTube killer. PaidContent.org has a nice wrap-up of the developing rumor here.

“The theory is that if you were to aggregate enough exclusive content in one place, you could actually change viewing patterns,” says an executive familiar with the cross-company talks.

Yet all the reports miss one important factor in YouTube’s success. The strength of YouTube isn’t the mass of copyrighted material and television shows, many of which have been purged. Rather, it’s the loyal community of viewers and users who upload content. That’s what Google was buying and what other media companies don’t have.

To this day the most popular video on YouTube isn’t a snarky big budget commercial, or any other traditional media production. It’s this — a homemade movie of a guy performing the history of dance. This is the type of content that makes the YouTube community vibrant and what keeps people coming back for the week’s best videos.

As this New York Times article states: “The most-viewed videos on YouTube are novelty bits, and proudly dorky.”

This isn’t to say that copyright content from media companies aren’t sought after online. And if a licensing agreement is ever made, they will become more popular on YouTube.

Since making first waves, YouTube has even become a way to make news for citizen journalists. And the genie is already out of the bottle. People know where they can go to upload content and my bet is that their loyalty will remain with whatever video portal gives them the best tools to upload. Watching a rerun of last Tuesday’s “American Idol” is probably second on their list of concerns and if the media companies in question don’t realize that — they might as well surrender the fate of television to Google now.
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Afterthought: Mediashift author Mark Glasner has a great satire of how “OurTube” would work in the year 2008.