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The Revolution Wasn't Televised: the Early Days of YouTube
mrflash818 sends this report from Mashable:
A decade ago, Netflix meant DVDs by mail, video referred to TV and the Internet meant simple text and pictures. All that changed in about 20 months. ... It was hard to get a handle on what YouTube was, exactly. The founders didn't know how to describe the project, so they called it a dating site. But since there weren't many videos on the site, Karim populated it with videos of 747s taking off and landing. Desperate to get people on the site, YouTube ran ads on Craigslist in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, offering women $20 for every video they uploaded. Not a single woman replied. Another vision for YouTube was a sort of video messaging service. “We thought it was going to be more of a closer circle relationship,” Chen said in a 2007 interview. “It was going to be me uploading a video and sharing it with eight people and I knew exactly who was going to be watching these videos — sharing with my family and my friends.” What actually happened was a “completely different use case” in which people uploaded videos and shared them with the world.
Can anyone explain the connection of the headline and the discussion topic? What did Youtube have to do with a revolution? Which revolution was it, one of the color ones? Or is this just some stream-of-consciousness blabbering of a Millennial child? I honestly don't understand.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
video was on the net much much earlier than a decade ago. I recall watching video on my computer as amiddle school kid, so at least as early as 97-98. yeah quality was trash, and clips were small. but thats what youtube was in V1 as well.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Before the advent of YouTube there had been others who had wanted to launch similar service, and the one big hurdle is the huge bandwidth cost that the videos consumed
Had it not because of Google, which bought up YouTube, it wouldn't have survived
Before Youtube there was Google Video which was pretty much the same. And before that and FLV there were plenty of video sites which embedded wmv's on webpages. Granted it was harder for a regular user to upload a video and have it seen by everyone but I wouldn't call Youtube a revolution of the internet by any means. I remember seeing webpages with small clips (obviously bandwidth was much more restrictive) in the late 90's when I first got online.
To me the real revolution is the hardware being more accessible. Being able to Skype someone on your phone in the streets instead of having to be at home at a desktop with a big round cam on top of the screen.
Youtube only made video sharing easier, but now it is overrun by ads so it's a relic of the past to me.
Youtube is a great example of how the tech industry really works.
Sure, they had their ideas for how their site would be used, but it was a **free site** where users could **post video**
free video posting
and it actually worked 99% of the time
Thank you Dave Raggett
It's a referback to a famous saying and song of the Seventies, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."
Gil Scott-Heron.
Kids these days. Probably don't get what either of the two basic meaning of "Tube" in YouTube mean either.
youtube, and the internet == new mass media. Try this experiment in the states for example: Delete your cookies, clear your flash cache, and load up youtube. You'll come to find that without your 'targeted' content youtube is just feeding you the same shit your TV does. So, what do you get?
CNN, CBS, MTV, Vevo, and the same fistful of extremely powerful multinational media companies pushing the same shit from their traditional media stations. Sure, you get a few locals like PewDiePie but at the end of the day those are all scripted and manufactured to youtubes content standards. content, duration, and script are all controlled to a certain standard.
There was no revolution, the cattle just got a shinier car. Look back at every Youtube music awards show and theyre all dominated by signed, industry backed artists in generally heavy rotation on radio and TV. If youtube were a legitimate way for small artists to distribute and promote their music, the RIAA would have shoveled google head-first into a woodchipper of litigation. Hell, not just the front page but look at your search results. chances are likely industry promoted, highly visible artists and performers will be casually interspersed regardless of their relevance because youtube is simply a means of consuming a product and generating revenue through targeted advertisement.
Good people go to bed earlier.
When Google bought YouTube, everybody wondered why they wanted what was basically a video piracy web site back then. Like Google had bought MegaUpload before it was taken down. It was only Google's market power that enabled them to keep going without getting sued out of business. They essentially steamrolled the rights holders. Licensing agreements wouldn't have happened any other way.
was pretty alive much earlier than 10 years ago. There's was plenty of porn sites, streaming events and tons of vector bases cartoons like these https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Success justifies all luck. Powerball, anyone?
The reason YOuTube was successful at the start was it was full of nothing but copy protected content posted illegally. People seem to forget this, but in the early days that's all people used it for until Google swooped in and gave it plenty of cash to change.
So there were moving pictures - from - the internet and sound.
And even before that was the "realplayer" and Flash was its honorable successor/competetor to the title security desaster(Realplayer got also ported to linux!! - yes and it worked).
And yes it was live streamed, I can remember that Tina Turner concert on Realplayer .. Tina was the most beautiful moving pixel I have ever seen!
Youtube is still full of copy-protected content posted illegally. You can stream nearly any song ever recorded through Youtube, and, although you can sometimes find "official" versions of songs posted, pretty much all songs have at least one bootleg version on there.
Remember Napster? Napster is back, it's subsidized by one of the world's largest tech companies, and it's no more legal than it was before. We live in a weird world.
"so they called it a dating site...YouTube ran ads on Craigslist...offering women $20 for every video they uploaded. Not a single woman replied."
I knew Facebook began as an attempt to get entitled jerks laid, but I didn't know Youtube had similar skeezy beginnings.
A decade ago, Netflix meant DVDs by mail, video referred to TV and the Internet meant simple text and pictures.
In 2005? No, The Internet was a lot more than "simple text and pictures". I think you're remembering 1995.
These days the most watched you tube videos are those featuring aliens coming to earth, aliens taking over earth, aliens are among us, aliens kill humans or aliens are already here, or if you are a churchie then things like why you should believe in a creator , why you should fear your god, why you should repent or why you need to not believe in aliens. and aliens are the work of the devil, See it all come back to aliens on you tube.
.....and video on the internet was very much present. Pretty sure Google already owned Youtube.
What made Youtube revolutionary was it did away with all the issues with codecs. I have been online since 1994, and I clearly remember the days of massive headaches trying to watch video downloaded from the net. Codecs where a serious problem....
Realplayer almost cornered the market but their own greed got in the way. The basic player was free however you had to pay to be able to create content and then you had to find a way to share it with the world.
Good thing they failed because Realplayer became a bloated infested POS malware that would bring your CPU down to it's knees.....
Http://www.entrarhotmail.info
Now if only YouTube would dump the mandatory linking to Google+ and do something about the rampant DMCA abuse on the site, maybe....just maybe....it would be worth 1/10th of the tonguebath the article gives it.