Early adopters, and early majority for online video services are now tapped out. In the following chart we see from 2008 to 2009, the number of unique viewers actually went down by around 2%. Usage rose, but uniques are flat. To take a shopping-mall analogy, sales, and foot traffic are up, but it’s the same people, and the other half of the city is ignoring the mall.

So the question is – are video products well positioned to attract the rest of the audience. And the answer is no. Your grandmother won’t watch TV on the Internet because it’s basically too much work. One could argue that by the time she breached the learning curve, web video as we know it will be an old-form curiosity – like Word Perfect for DOS.

For those companies trying to reach late majority video users, or trying to re-innovate for next-generation video services there are clear opportunities. But, for the short term YouTube has sucked the life out of web video innovation and left it stalled at the click-happy gates of our soon-to-be past.