Everything Old is New Again: Is Amateur TV the Wave of the Future?

Some two decades ago, a new technology began sweeping the nation, creating an army of amateur filmmakers who looked like they might change the face of Hollywood. As director Francis Ford Coppola once quipped, "Suddenly one day, some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the next Mozart and make a beautiful film with her little father's camcorder. And for once, this whole 'professionalism' about movie making will be destroyed forever and lead into an art form."

On a large scale, Coppola's prediction didn't exactly come true. But the camcorder revolution did produce one unequivocal media sensation: America's Funniest Home Videos. Since 1989, ABC has aired the popular amateur video show, and reruns continue to play in syndication to this day. The success of the series – which showcases all manner of domestic bloopers, crying babies and stupid pet tricks – is YouTube's most obvious predecessor.

So it should come as no surprise that cable giant Comcast is planning to attract homegrown work to a new video-contest website, ziddio.com, and eventually broadcast the best content on its video-on-demand TV service, as the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The news follows on the heels of rumors that Verizon TV subscribers may also be able to watch YouTube videos on their boob-tubes for a fee.

TV personality Carson Daly, a friend to The Daily Reel and founder of web initiative "It's Your Show TV," has also promised online video-makers the chance to see their work on actual TV screens. Kevin Reilly, president of NBC Entertainment, which is partnering with Daly on the project, told Adweek, "Our next phase of this project will be to integrate the best and worst of this content into a program broadcast on NBC."

Comcast and Verizon haven't disclosed how they'll make their new amateur-video collections available to viewers. The Wall Street Journal suggests one plan is to package them into 15- to 30-minute programs and let viewers put together playlists the same way they do on a computer. (But if you have a computer, why would you do this on your television?)

Either way, it all sounds a lot like America's Funniest Home Videos, which perhaps anticipated the future of television more than we all realized. If Reality TV was such a big deal in the last few years, is Amateur TV next?