So what happened?  Why can that dancing guy or lonelygirl or any number of other video projects (Rocketboom, anyone?) reach numbers WAY better than Bud.tv and do so on little or no money.

The first problem, of course, is Budweiser, itself. The King of Beers?  Hardly. 

Here's the typical lifecycle for new technologies as compared to Bud.tv and YouTube:

Stage 1 --  Technology is developed by a geek or geeks who think it is a cool idea and just have to have it.

    Bud.tv was developed by highly-paid ad and marketing executives who can't code and wouldn't watch Bud.tv if they weren't being paid to do so.

    YouTube was developed by three geeks who thought it was a cool idea and just had to have it.

Stage 2 -- Revenue does not appear in substantial amounts for several months.  Business either lives or dies as a result.

    Bud.tv cost $30 million so anything less than millions in revenue would be considered failure.  Business was doomed.

    YouTube cost nothing to develop and began with a $99 per month server, scaling-up as traffic and revenue grew... pocket change to begin.

Stage 3 -- Early adopters find site, making it modestly popular.

    Bud.tv couldn't find enough early adopters who drank Bud.  No surprise there.  Business was doomed.
   
    YouTube early adopters not only provided enough revenue to grow the system, they provided the CONTENT to grow the system.

Stage 4 -- Absent viral growth, early adopters get bored and go away.

    Bud.tv didn't even get this far.  Users failed to provide content, losses too great.  Business was doomed.

    YouTube experienced viral growth and never looked back.

Stage 5 -- Business has enough capital to survive post-early adopter dip, eventually finds market and succeeds.

    Bud.tv was over-capitalized, over-produced, and never had a chance to make it this far.  Business was doomed.

    YouTube sold to Google for $1.65 billion.  Film at 11.

So Bud.tv was doomed from the start.  It attempted to build buzz around something not very buzzworthy, spent WAY too much money to ever be profitable in the imagined time frame, and generally used content created for pay by people who didn't drink Bud except at client meetings.

Now it is easy for me to write this in retrospect, but I think most people could have predicted it.  The better exercise at this point might be to figure out how such a site might have been able to succeed, because I think it can be done.  Here's how:

1)  Choose a different beer.  The problem with Bud as a beer is that it is aimed at people who don't participate much in social networking or video sharing web sites.  In one sense this was deliberate on the part of Anheuser-Busch because they were ideally trying to attract new drinkers, but the web just doesn't work that way.  You have to start with the enthusiasm then add technology, not the other way around.  To be successful, beer.tv (our straw man) ought to start with a beer label that already has a fanatical following among techies.  I'm no beer expert, but Sierra Nevada, Samuel Adams, or even Anchor Steam would have had far better chances of succeeding than Bud, in part because they are more modest operations with more modest aspirations.

2)  Choose different developers -- a different kind of developer, too.  Start with beer drinkers -- fanatical beer drinkers -- then get them to fight for the chance to develop your beer site.  It's all about the beer.

3)  Spend less money.  Rather than building a network, create a seed that encourages a more organic network growth based as much as possible on user-generated video.  The network acts as a catalyst providing the hosting and the social networking structure, but counting primarily on users to fill it out.  This is not just to save money but also to allow the intelligence of the mob to rule, taking the site where it SHOULD go to reach more eyeballs, not where you and your experts THINK it should go.

4)  Spend money more wisely working to catalyze content.  Commission some examples, sure, but spend even more money running video contests with prizes that involve huge quantities of brew, NOT money.  Don't make shows as much as events.  Think redbull.tv.

5)  Scale the business up over time.  Start small and grow as-needed, not as-fantasized.

The saddest part about Bud.tv is that it might have succeeded had it been the brainchild of the wacky nephew of an A-B regional distributor.  As they did it, though, Bud.tv was far too professional to have succeeded in the current market.