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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.
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, I remember occasionally watching very (*very*) low resolution Real Video and similar clips over a dial-up connection circa the late 90s. But not very often, because...
quality was trash, and clips were small
Indeed.
thats what youtube was in V1 as well
From what I remember, even the early 240p YouTube clips (which gave rise to the site's now-fading association with low-quality video) were still better than anything that could be viewed in anything like real time streaming over dial-up.
YouTube came along at almost exactly the same point (circa the mid-2000s) that broadband started seriously taking over from dial-up as the main method of Internet access for your average, mass-market user. And while broadband connections of the time might be slow- and the early YouTube videos low resolution- by modern standards, this was still a massive improvement upon what had gone before.
Yeah, I'm sure many people were sharing movie and video files before that- some, no doubt, over university-owned broadband connections et al- but YouTube was far more usable and less disparate than finding those clips, and came along at a time when the technology let a rapidly-increasing number of people take advantage of it.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Yeah. This article reminds me of people saying Apple single-handedly invented portable media players, smartphones, and tablets and no one even thought it was possible or even desirable before... It happens with a lot of other stuffs... People have bad memory, and youngsters just think the world was invented as they hear and see it... (of course it's not particularly new to these newer generations, we are just getting older...).
Aside from newsgroups and IRC (the article is supposed to talk about "the Internet", contrasting it with other media, although the header has a "when-web-videos-were-awful dept" mention), RealPlayer was released in 1995 and RealVideo in 1997, most notably, and the DivX/XviD codecs are from 2001. I remember many websites with many RM videos embedded or downloadable from at least 1999 (I was surfing a lot on random websites as a teen connecting to the Internet with connection kits from CDs in magazines without my parent knowledge... well, until the bills got "a little" too high and I tried to make it look like the last one got some rain on it which teared through the paper, erasing some numbers...), including random clips not from TV. And of course there was Napster in 1999, KaZaA in 2001, and eMule in 2002, with tons of videos of all sorts (beside pr0n, I was downloading a lot of anime starting from 2001). And you have to remember GIFs and Flash animations were used a lot for random animated content too. It all was very progressive, from all parts of the world, with many different actors having similar ideas and testing them...