Chico Bongalar

"Chico Bongalar is a tubby twenty-something guy - real name Grant - and he likes making videos. At the moment Chico is the No. 1 attraction on Trouble Homegrown, the UK television channel's attempt to mirror the runaway success of web sites like MySpace and YouTube.

Chico talks about his life, getting a suntan and eats a slice of bread. Doesn't sound like much, but he created a bit of a buzz. Chico is part of a new wave of amateur video talent that includes the Beijing karaoke champs, aka the Chinese Backstreet Boys (sponsored by Coca-Cola), the folk singer Sandi Thom (now with a £1 million recording deal) and the Arctic Monkeys, who went from obscurity to the Brit Awards, all kickstarted by the web.

Chico and millions of others who upload amateur videos to the growing number of user-generated content sites such as YouTube have sent shockwaves through big media companies - and executives are sitting up and paying attention.

It's not just for the size of the audience; there's the increasingly contentious issue of content ownership and control.

Chico's video narratives are free online, just like all MySpace and YouTube content, because people like Chico create this stuff mostly just to share ideas and get attention. Until recently, online fame and the potential of discovery seemed enough, and the commercialisation of so-called user-generated content (UGC) sites was not an issue - because the sites were startups and below the radar of big media organisations. But that's all changing.

Sites such as YouTube are growing up. MySpace is now owned by News Corpora-tion. Trouble's Homegrown and MTV Flux have been created by publicly-listed, bot-tom-line-oriented media companies. They may be interested in nurturing new talent, but the MTVs of the world also want to profit from this new creative pool.

"YouTube and MySpace are all about community, and I don't believe that their initial plans were to commercially exploit uploaded material, but rather only to build busi-ness models based on ad revenues," says Alexander Ross, a partner at Wiggin LLP, a media and technology law firm. "Contrast that with an MTV and some others, who appear to be approaching the model more from a broadcaster's perspective."

Citation from "The Guardian: Whose Content is it anyway?" (2006)