No longer content to being just a giant telecom and maker of a strange browser, AT&T has jumped on the web video bandwagon with VideoCrawler. Branded as a "better way for people to search for, organize and share online videos and other multimedia content," VideoCrawler is clearly a move by AT&T to take its own slice of the revenue pie made out of all these videos that are streaming through its tubes.
With a quiet statement that it understands what this whole social media thing is all about, AT&T launched VideoCrawler as an open beta today. The site acts more or less like a cable network for the web, using indexing and searching technology from Divvio to aggregate videos across properties like YouTube, Hulu, Google Video, Break, MySpace Video, and more. Most of the basic video community features are here: users can create custom playlists, e-mail clips to friends, add ratings, share videos over a number of social services like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, and get a quick view of what's popular across the site.
VideoCrawler will be supported by its own advertising, but the introduction of a video aggregating community from such a large ISP is interesting in a number of ways. First, AT&T is following in Comcast's bandwidth-cap-footsteps by experimenting with better ways to monetize heavy downloaders. Plus, there's no question that an aggregating site like VideoCrawler makes it easier for users to commune around an even larger firehose of dancing cats and trendy memes. But VideoCrawler, and any other sites like it that gain significant traction, could also instigate a shift toward heavier pre-, mid-, and post-roll videos if more users never make it to the original place where a video resides.
