Five Years of YouTube and Forced Evolution

NakNak writes to mention that the DailyMaverick has a feature looking back at five years of YouTube, some of the massive changes that have been forced through as a result of its overwhelming popularity, and what changes might be necessary going forward. "Google, which bought YouTube less than two years after it was founded for what was then considered outrageously expensive $1.65 billion, does not want Microsoft or Apple (or anybody else) to own the dominant video format. So it has become the biggest early tester of HTML5. Your browser doesn't support HTML5? Google launches its own browser, Chrome. Need to use Internet Explorer at work because that's all your IT department supports? Google launches a Chrome framework that effectively subverts IE and makes it HTML5-compatible. The final blow will be the day that YouTube switches off Flash and starts streaming only to HTML5 browsers. On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage."

Comments

Thanks to YouTube

[boudie2]

Checking today there are 3,180 videos matching the term "lighting farts". That and people reviving Rick Astley's career. It's a fun diversion, but you really have to wonder. About civilization.

Re:Thanks to YouTube

[Petrushka]

It's a fun diversion, but you really have to wonder. About civilization.

People are still reading Aristophanes. Fart jokes have always been funny. I'm not worrying too much. (Not about that, anyway.)

Re:Thanks to YouTube

[Rei]

After some searching, I came up with this list of supposedly the ten oldest jokes, as compiled by a University of Wolverhampton study commissioned by the TV channel "Dave":

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1. Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap (1900 BC - 1600 BC Sumerian Proverb Collection 1.12-1.13)

2. How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish (An abridged version first found in 1600 BC on the Westcar Papryus)

3. Three ox drivers from Adab were thirsty: one owned the ox, the other owned the cow and the other owned the wagon's load. The owner of the ox refused to get water because he feared his ox would be eaten by a lion; the owner of the cow refused because he thought his cow might wander off into the desert; the owner of the wagon refused because he feared his load would be stolen. So they all went. In their absence the ox made love to the cow which gave birth to a calf which ate the wagon's load. Problem: Who owns the calf?! (1200 BC)

4. A woman who was blind in one eye has been married to a man for 20 years. When he found another woman he said to her, "I shall divorce you because you are said to be blind in one eye." And she answered him: "Have you just discovered that after 20 years of marriage!?" (Egyptian circa 1100 BC)

5. Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his real name is nobody. When Odysseus instructs his men to attack the Cyclops, the Cyclops shouts: "Help, nobody is attacking me!" No one comes to help. (Homer. The Odyssey 800 BC)

6. Question: What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon and three at evening? Answer: Man. He goes on all fours as a baby, on two feet as a man and uses a cane in old age (Appears in Oedipus Tyrannus and first performed in 429 BC)

7. Man is even more eager to copulate than a donkey - his purse is what restrains him (Egyptian, Ptolemaic Period 304 BC - 30 BC)

8. Augustus was touring his Empire and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to himself. Intrigued he asked: "Was your mother at one time in service at the Palace?" "No your Highness," he replied, "but my father was." (Credited to the Emporer Augustus 63 BC - 29 AD)

9. Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, a pedant did not offer him any food. When the donkey died of hunger, he said "I've had a great loss. Just when he had learned not to eat, he died." (Dated to the Philogelos 4th /5th Century AD)

10. Asked by the court barber how he wanted his hair cut, the king replied: "In silence." (Collected in the Philogelos or "Laughter-Lover" the oldest extant jest book and compiled in the 4th/5th Century AD)
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I suspect that #2 is actually a double entendre, since "spearing fish" was an Egyptian euphemism for having sex (the word for "to spear" also means "impregnate", while the word for "throwstick" also means "to beget". The Nile marshes themselves were considered a symbol of fertility because of an association with Hathor.

The oldest joke from Britain was:

"What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? Answer: A key."

Re:Title bar color?

[Qubit]

Why is the title bar red?

Forced Evolution, duh!

Haven't you been paying attention?

or.....

[tacokill]

On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage

Or, like the thousands of examples that came before.....people will simply go to another website that does not have such requirements.

But don't let me rain on your parade.

Re:or.....

[Maxo-Texas]

What other sites have content like You Tube?

Seriously? Where else can I go for similar content?

and this is how google wins

[circletimessquare]

some business school moron could have said "hey, why don't we leverage our power and force a proprietary format on consumers, and they will be our captive audience"

like microsoft

like sony

etc

has any of it worked? no

for all the anxiety about google's increasing power, as long google does something like this: actively undermine and destroy a closed format in favor of an open one, then the consumer wins, google wins, other companies win, progress and innovation wins, and shortsighted greedy assholes who try to manipulate market inefficiencies in their favor lose (i'm looking at you, music and other media companies). in this context, at least, google really is "doing no evil"

Re:and this is how google wins

[Rockoon]

for all the anxiety about google's increasing power, as long google does something like this: actively undermine and destroy a closed format in favor of an open one

You mean like how Google actively undermines H.264?

Yes. I am very impressed that they are actively undermining H.264.

Definitely it can be said that Google actively undermines H.264.

life in the old browsers yet

[petes_PoV]

On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage

While youtube is nice for idling away some downtime, it's not the internet-dominating force this article makes out. If it disappeared tomorrow, than apart from instantly increasing corporate productivity and allowing children everywhere to get their homework done on time, there wouldn't be so much of a change.

There are also (sit down, this might be a bit of a shock) lots and lots of people who rarely, if ever visit youtube. For them, it's existence or change in the tech. it needs will make no difference at all - if their old browsers fail I'm sure they find other things to do on the internet.

While I'm sure youtube will keep going - for some time at least, and will change more over time there's nothing life changing about it.

Re:life in the old browsers yet

[FranTaylor]

"If it disappeared tomorrow, than apart from instantly increasing corporate productivity"

Really? My employer uses YouTube a lot. We make YouTube videos of customer recommendations. Having an engineer gush about all of the time he saves with our product makes a very effective sales tool.

A lot of companies use YouTube for instructional videos for their products. Why bother with complex printed directions when you can watch a real live human do it?

Really you should not dismiss the value of something just because YOU can't figure out how to do something useful with it.

If Youtube ever shuts off flv streaming...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There won't be enough waaaambulances in the entire world to handle the mass-casualty incident at Adobe HQ...

Re:Perish

[lwsimon]

Name a popular flash-only site than a majority of iPhone users visit on a regular basis on their desktop or laptop.

YouTube works on iPhone, and Safari for iPhone supports HTML5. From an industry perspective, iPhone's lack of Flash is a *good* thing. From a personal standpoint, as an iPhone user, its a small negative - something that would be nice, but to be honest, I don't really miss.

Re:User outrage more likely to be at Google

[inanet]

User sees link "Can't see the video? Click here to remedy and download Google Chrome" user downloads and installs Google Chrome. Microsoft cries in pain. Users these days are a good deal smarter than they used to be, if someone is smart enough to install flash, they are smart enough to install Chrome.. for the most part, or they will have a kid / friend who will do it for them.

Re:.h26x a stumbling point?

[Rashkae]

Well, close. Firefox will be unable to include the decoding of h264 right into the browser. But there is already work underway to simply hand over the video to an underlaying OS system, (Gstreamer for Linux, as example.). It will then be up to the user to aquire the required codecs and what not, which can't legally be distributed in North America as entirely free software, (but in practice, patents have never stopped free software before, only creates annoying red tape.) Gstream and ffmpeg have been able to handle h264 for longer than I remember, and I don't expect that to change at all. It's probably a good thing that Firefox will use existing software rather than creating yet another decoder to deal with.

Chrome Frame

[tepples]

User gets angry at YouTube, not IE

"YouTube no longer uses Flash. Now we use Chrome Frame to provide you with new features. Click here to install Chrome Frame." The user response really isn't that much different from the "Your Flash Player is too old" that YouTube started serving once Nintendo finally upgraded Wii Internet Channel from Flash 7.

Re:Perish

[Abalamahalamatandra]

I'm not an Apple fanboi, but I will say: the problem is not that the iPhone doesn't support Flash, the problem is that Flash, as a proprietary overlay to the open Web, even exists.

I spend most of my time on my desktop using NoScript to actively BLOCK Flash, and grudgingly allow it to run when I have no other alternative to get the information I need. Flash support on a mobile phone without the means to easily block it via a permissions structure is an absolute battery and usability nightmare waiting to happen.

Re:Perish (reasons why flash is not supported)

[AndrewStephens]

The video sites I will give you (although if they really wanted to be on the iPhone they would just make the original h264 files available) but people bemoaning the lack of flash games on the iPhone are missing an important point - none of the existing flash games would work anyway!

The iPhone doesn't have a keyboard and (even worse) has no mouse. These two facts alone mean that the vast majority of game would not work. Even games that use the mouse purely for pointing would run into problems, since tapping with your finger is much less precise than using a mouse pointer. In addition, on the iPhone you effectively have multiple pointing devices - how would current Flash apps handle that?

For a quick demo of why sites like newsgrounds will never work on the iPhone, resize your browser window to 480*320 (or 320*480 since that is more usual) and visit your favourite gaming site. Now set your mouse pointer to a big white blob instead of an arrow to similar tapping with a large figertip. Remember to stop playing after 45 minutes to simulate the battery drain. See how much fun you have.

Re:Perish

[mikael_j]

Only because youve drunk so much of the koolaid and so used to be roughed up by corporations that you have no idea what its like to have a phone platform that does more

First off, I'll admit that I generally like Apple's products since they different parts are well-integrated (just to get that part out of the way, if that makes you think I'm a fanboy or that I've "drunk the kool-aid" then so be it).

Second, I've used and owned other smartphones that were much more capable than the iPhone on paper but which with real-world usage fell flat because of massive user interface issues, applications that leaked memory and general instability that made any perceived stability issues with the iPhone seem completely insignificant in comparison.

An example of this is the touchscreen on a friend's "high end" Nokia (I think) smartphone which together with the general UI lag makes using the phone painful, precision was so poor it was almost painful.

A second example would be my gf's phone (I can't remember the brand or model, the models are all 32789XS91080++ TouchTurboDeluxe gibberish to me), I experimented a bit with the UI and concluded that from the default "home" screen it took about half a dozen keypresses to get to the browser, once the browser was running I had to open a menu, scroll down to the "I want to visit a website" option and scroll down to the "I want to enter an URL manually" option before I could enter an URL. And that was the fastest path I could find. As a comparison, on an iPhone entering an URL involves tapping Safari, tapping the address bar and typing in the URL. It's hardly revolutionary but at least it's done right.

As for flash, the only times I miss that is when I stumble across some website designed by some incompetent hack who thinks the only way to do menu rollover effects is with flash...

/Mikael

The new YouTube video page

[A Friendly Troll]

I've been selected to try out the new YouTube video page. If that's forced evolution, then I don't want to be a part of it...

There are no normal links anywhere anymore. Whereas previously the video links were http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxxx, they are now monstrosities with a hundred characters in the URL.

It's all full of AJAX. I haven't tried disabling JS to see what happens... The layout has changed, it's confusing, and it's ugly. When the video you are watching stops, the next one starts automatically, as if it were all a giant playlist.

If you get that piece of garbage (which is a clear devolution, not an evolution), delete YouTube's cookies. I'm not sure which one was responsible; I just got rid of all of them and got normal YouTube back.

Re:The new YouTube video page

[Culture20]

Waaaaah waaaaah waaaaah I hate change. Change sucks!

A lot of times it does. In this specific case, posting a URL to a specific youtube video will soon look like posting a URL to a location in googlemaps, and you apparently can't rewind and rewatch a clip you just saw as easily, or spend some time choosing a related clip; they force one on you.

Re:Open Web alternative to Newgrounds?

[yelvington]

And what about the weekly exploit or two? Flash has never missed a beat. Will browsers implementing HTML5 expose us to at least the same level of risk that Flash does?

Will HTML5 also cause my browser (even if it's just a sandboxed tab) to crash several times per day, like Flash does now? I sure hope so, otherwise the experience just wouldn't be the same.

Sadly, those features are missing from early versions of HTML5 browsers, but perhaps Microsoft will step up to the plate with HTML5+ Enterprise Edition Bonus Pack.

Re:.h26x a stumbling point?

[bzipitidoo]

H.264 has significantly better video quality

Wrong. Ogg Theora is nearly identical in quality to H.264. Both are a lot better than H.263. Judge for yourself: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

will be free until at least 2015, and I'm willing to bet it will continue to be free after that.

If there are no alternatives, I'm sure H.264 will not remain free. Once everyone is hooked, why on Earth wouldn't the owners start charging money for it? Because they're such nice people? LOL. If they have no plans to start charging for it, why don't they make it free forever, starting now? Since they have not done so, obviously they are hoping they can eventually charge money for it.

The war is already over

Propaganda. If it was over, we'd all know that already. The fact you feel you have to make a proclamation suggests you're not sure yourself, or that you have a hidden agenda. You say it's everywhere, and that's why it has already won. It's not nearly as widespread as you seem to think. Many of us do not use Blu-Ray. Much video on the Internet is still H.263.

Re:Perish

[Stuart Gibson]

Just to nitpick, Vimeo works perfectly on iPhone and, in fact, has an iPhone optimised interface.

As an aside, more people should develop their site to work on an iPhone first, then scale it up. It forces you to decide what it *actually* important on the site. If it isn't needed on iPhone, why is it needed on the full version?