I see the future of YouTube as being a service to which people can upload their videos which — given the right licensing settings — can be remixed and reimagined in-browser by third parties.

On this platform, everyone contributes to a library of content that can be used by anyone to do anything, the payoff for sharing your content is that everyone else has access to yours. I think Larry Lessig would agree.

Unfortunately, the interface for accomplishing such a level of collaboration doesn’t yet exist, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t already started happening. Introducing thru-you.com — a site run by YouTuber ‘Kutiman’ that remixes unrelated existing user-submitted YouTube musical content into new pieces; making songs played by ‘bands’ whose members have never met one another. The result is pretty cool to behold:

Under the editorial control of Kutiman, a massive pool of unrelated source material has been crafted together into an original piece. Conceptually, this is reminiscent of the sampling done in hip-hop, but from a much larger, more diverse pool.

Generating these movies required downloading each of the YouTube videos, converting them to an editor-friendly format, stitching them together and then uploading them again — something that is likely beyond most casual YouTubers’ technical abilities. It won’t always be this way, and soon I believe new technologies will emerge that allow all YouTube users to better leverage the content that their entire community has generated. Once this happens, the remix-culture will really be in full swing.

Part and parcel with viewing YouTube as a platform with open content that can be used and displayed however a content remixer likes is a new way to view YouTube videos: YooouuuTuuube.com. YooouuuTuuube.com takes a normal YouTube video and spits out the frames on a grid before your eyes. The result is pretty different from the normal experience of watching a YouTube video, but it shows the new kind of media that can be created when existing media is open (or at least taken) for use by others. To see it in action, check out this YooouuuTuuube’d version of ‘Junior Kickstart’ by The Go! Team — Enjoy!