"A generation of young, talented filmmakers is on the rise thanks to the explosion of online video," said Jason Zajac, vice-president of social media for Yahoo! Search. "Video has the power to convey messages like no other medium. Through our sponsorship with FYI, Yahoo! and Jumpcut will empower these young adults to unleash their creative and civic passion on a wide range of social issues."
Online video usage has increased rapidly in recent months with YouTube being the top destination for online video makers and viewers. The introduction of video search amongst search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, has contributed considerably to this rapid increase in online video usage, with sites like Singingfish being set up purely as an audio and video search engine. Just as with web pages and images, search engines now index videos on the internet, allowing users to search for TV clips and videos of events they may have missed. The fact that more and more users have high speed internet in their homes has also made the viewing of videos online much more convenient, and the development of online video usage is clearly escalating the internet's existence as a top entertainment medium.
The FYI contest will be posted at Jumpcut, a video editing site acquired by Yahoo! in 2006, which offers free video editing and publishing tools. Visitors to the site will be able to vote for their favourite videos, and there will be official judges including actor John Cusack, Yahoo! chief executive Terry Semel and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. The winners of the competition will win internships at Universal Pictures and trips to the FYI 2007 Awards Ceremony to be held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
The president of Film Your Issue, Heathcliff Rothman, commented:
"The FYI - Film Your Issue partnership with Yahoo! provides entrants with both the platform and the tools to engage, create and participate in the exploding online community of digital video, the world's most powerful medium."
