Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Revolution Wasn't Televised: the Early Days of YouTube

Posted by Soulskill on from the when-web-videos-were-awful dept.

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.

6 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!
  2. ummm... by ganjadude · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
    1. Re:ummm... by kesuki · · Score: 3, Informative

      having been around (online) in 1997 i can assure you video cds and avi files were rampant on irc networks at the time. real player was around as soon as yahoo was launched (acoording to wikis) and while real encoder wasn't free it wasn't long after the release of the fraunhauffer codecs for audio that mysterious mpeg-4 as divx came along.

      --
      https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
  3. Youngster. by xenoc_1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Youngster. by xenoc_1 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yep. Certified Old Fart here.

  4. It succeeeded due to it's copyright infringment by blahbooboo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.