User-generated content is slipping in importance on YouTube as major media corporations increasingly use the video site as a distribution channel for their own wares.

From Richard Siklos's column in The Globe and Mail:

So far, YouTube has struggled to figure out ways to generate significant revenue from its vast ocean of clips. Not that the traditional media folks are minting it online, either.

But as Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, points out, advertisers are mainly interested in Web video that is “programmed,” both in terms of knowing precisely what it is and when and where it will appear – user-generated content, by nature, is neither of those things. (YouTube does not give out breakdowns on pro-versus-amateur popularity. But its list of the Top 10 most-viewed videos of all time includes a bunch of pro music videos – No. 1 is by Canada's very own Avril Lavigne – a couple of comedy routines, a Spanish-language short film, and a user-uploaded clip of a laughing Swedish baby that has been viewed nearly 67 million times. Go figure.)

What's obviously happening here is the beginning of a monumental battle for online viewers' attention. The consulting firm ABI Research predicts more than a trillion videos will be streamed worldwide in 2013, up from 32 billion in 2006.

Meanwhile, a recent IBM survey shows that Web-video viewers around the world are watching less TV. Indeed, a second front in this battle for eyeballs opened up this year via a flood of professionally produced “webisodes” from the likes of Sony, NBC, and the respective creators of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Family Guy.

This was the first year that original video content for the Web had something approximating a fall season and – mirroring what's happened in conventional TV – breakout hits have proven to be as rare as a Javan rhino. Sports and comedy always do well, and “branded entertainment” – webisodes paid for by advertisers with their products integrated into their stories – have proliferated. (That raises a third, unnerving, possibility: that the future of video may be determined neither by users nor media companies, but by marketers.)

Where's this all going? Big media will put more and more full-length material online for two reasons. One, streaming content online actually makes it harder to steal. Two, viewers are moving to the Web anyway, and it's a zero-sum game. CBS and Fox and the rest would rather people watch their stuff online than have them go to Dailymotion, break.com, or any of the other video sites out there. At some point not too far off, the distinction between the Web and what we think of as TV will eventually dissolve away, anyway.