Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Founders Interviewed
An anonymous reader writes: "FORTUNE's Adam Lashinsky interviews co-founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley.
'In just five months, YouTube has gone from beta testing to part of the national zeitgeist. The website is a place where anyone with a home video can post it online and create an endlessly entertaining diversion for bored office workers -- who've been watching 40 million clips a day.'"
What I'd like to have seen asked is how they plan to deal with copyright infringement on the site with the vast amounts of content which they host. Both technical and legal answers would be interesting, I think.
INAL, but could copyright issues be more problematic once they start making money off these videos? I mean, I know no label really wants to sell old Prince videos, but somehow they're huge on YouTube. Do you really think content producers (record labels, movie studios, musicians, maybe even regular users) would be okay with that, or would they want a piece of the action? I mean, they own the copyright, and I don't think that posting entire music videos online could be considered fair use.
That's the reason Google News doesn't have ads, after all - if they did, they'd run into legal issues (or so I've heard).
P.S. This is a pretty short article with only a bit of information - and it's vague info at that. What gives?
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
I like YouTube because you can upload files and view them with Linux.
I hope Google video supports Linux soon!
YouTube doesn't currently the one video I would love to see -- a tour of their server farm, network, dev offices, etc. I would love to have a behind the scenes look.
Look closer - there are Google text-ads on nearly every page.
The Forbes article from a few weeks ago states that thier bandwidth usage is approximately 200TB per day, the cost of which "may be approaching $1 million a month".
I think that YouTube is going to be a major player in the near term. The tv companies have completely shot themselves in the foot and someone is going to dethrone them as the king of captive eyeballs.
Fact #1)The TV industry has changed from real productions to idiots with camera's (aka reality tv). By doing that alone, they've dropped the cost of creating a show to little more than a camera, a stupid idea and idiots.
Fact #2) Digital Cameras have gotten extremely cheap
Fact #3) There are millions of untapped idiots with their own camera's worldwide
By shoving reality tv down everyones throat, they've basically commoditized the creation of television content. YouTube is poised to make a killing, if just by putting basic ads on idiots doing stupid shit on camera, the same thing the tv companies do except over ip.
Already old media is feeling the force of podcasts, converting their existing shows to allow users to listen to what they want when they want it (and usually commercial free). It's only a matter of time before YouTube (or someone else) does the same to video. Keeping the clips short seems to be a good idea since most people don't have much of an attention span these days (if you've read this far, you're probably ahead of the curve).
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Redundant concern I know - but consider this lil' nugget.
This Week In Tech (TWIT) broadcast for this week (ep 53) mentioned a bandwidth cost of more than 1 million a month. That's peanuts to a network (or network affiliate), but considering their cash flow is investment derrived, they're going to have to do something - and FAST - or become the pets.com of the web 2.0 era.
I'm rooting for them because some of the material is fantastic, and I'm noting more sites using it for hosting videos for other sites and blogs - which I think is it's best case for being. I know my sites couldn't handle a slashdotting - and neither could my pocketbook - but youTube makes for a great video podcasting solution.