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.

Comments

Huh?

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Re: Huh?

[alen]

A lot of businesses like strategy guides killed off by youtube

Re: Huh?

[billdale]

LOL!!! If you really don't get it, call your mom, tell her you need to move back into her basement. You'll never make it in this world... or, maybe you just can't handle the truth... single individuals, or small groups of them, really can have profound, lasting effects on the world in just a short period of time, with stunningly little effort. And if you can't bear acknowledging other people's successes, you'll never, ever allow yourself a measure of accomplishment, either. You remind me of the dingbat blogger that insisted that Elon Musk never had any original ideas, never actually started any companies, and is basically just a plagiarist and copy cat. In actual fact, we can be quite sure whoever this twerp was, he is the one with no originality. If he can't see the guy behind PayPal, Spacex, Tesla, Solar City, and a dozen lesser entities as having some major cojones, the two of you need to get together and leave the rest of us alone.

ummm...

[ganjadude]

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.

Re:ummm...

[kesuki]

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.

Re:ummm...

[ganjadude]

really? because I had video of concerts that I took on my personal fan page for a band back then. it in no was was only official clips back then

Re:ummm...

[silverkniveshotmail.]

But video sucked in 1997 and it kept sucking until YouTube; if a random person wanted to share a video to a handful of people there really wasn't a good way of doing it. Realplayer was a client, not a distribution system, I remember downloading VideoCDs with FlashFXP off of questionable sites and getting binaries from usenet but it was shit compared to YouTube.

Re:ummm...

[ganjadude]

point remains, there was video before youtube, where as the summary makes it seem as if thats not true

Re:ummm...

[Dogtanian]

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.

Re:ummm...

[Darinbob]

No. You could get video from the internet. There were ftp sites, USENET, university file servers, etc. From even the 80s. Of course the videos weren't very good and were generally very small. But then the early youtube videos were very low quality too.

Re:ummm...

[Darinbob]

It kept sucking after youtube. I dismissed youtube at the start because its videos were so much lower quality than what I had seen elsewhere.

Re:ummm...

[ganjadude]

no argument there whatsoever. I simply dont like when people says things like this was the first X, or the first Y, when the truth is it was the first mainstream X or Y. Give credit to those who did do X or Y first is all im saying

Re:ummm...

[Darinbob]

Because most videos back then weren't "streaming". Yes, Youtube may have been an improvement, but that's not the same thing as implying that it invented the whole concept.

Re:ummm...

[Dogtanian]

Because most videos back then weren't "streaming".

I know that- and they weren't "streaming" because while Joe Average was on dial-up, streaming wasn't possible at a quality most people would tolerate for anything longer than brief clips. And that was my whole point about the switch to broadband.

Yes, Youtube may have been an improvement, but that's not the same thing as implying that it invented the whole concept.

To be fair, that wasn't *my* claim. Strictly speaking you're correct and the summary is a bit misleading (and may be more so to someone who wasn't around back then).

And yes, I myself downloaded videos before YouTube came along, so I know that this is the case.

But it is fair to say that video on the Internet before YouTube was probably an order or two of magnitude less common than it is today- both in terms of what's out there and how much we view. And the qualitative change- i.e. *how* we view and respond to it- in terms of real-time streaming and responding viat comments and *what* we view (i.e. much more user-generated content) is quite different to downloading a film or TV programme over P2P or whatever.

Yes, there was *some* non-Big-Media-produced content before YouTube (mainly from mid-sized websites) and a small amount of end-user produced content... but this (and particularly the latter) exploded when YouTube came along.

Re:ummm...

[jythie]

Video existed yes, but it did not really occupy the same place as it did after youtube became mainstream.

Re:ummm...

[martin-boundary]

Bwahaha! Most videos *today* aren't "streaming". I don't watch any videos on youtube or otherwise "live", I always download them, and start watching them with mplayer. Let me tell you a dirty little secret: the videos are files you can download with any browser or command line tool, if you know the correct url. Most services try to hide those urls just to mess with the riffraff.

You can find out the urls by either installing a download extension for your browser, or using an extension that shows the HTTP headers for all the requests your browser does, or in many other ways that get progressively more tedious.

Interestingly enough, real streaming content existed and was unsuccessful before youtube. It existed in the form of an rtsp protocol implemented by a small company called RealMedia. It was unsuccessful because the player was constantly buffering and the picture quality was too low to improve throughput. This was years _before_ youtube.

Video quality on the net improved only when streaming was abandoned in favour of file downloads, because this insulates you from network issues better than on the fly buffering, and it also allows higher resolution and quality tradeoffs in a more continuous way.

Of course the biggest improvement was simply that in the last 15 years most people have had acess to broadband, to the extent that people like you are duped into thinking your downloaded content is "streaming".

Re:ummm...

[Luckyo]

That is incorrect. Realplayer made a whole business model around compressing both audio and video enough to be vieweable as a stream over analogue modem connection.

The problem was that implementation was left to each individual site, which typically sucked donkey balls. You'd have tiny video window in the middle of a page choke full of flashing ads and other similar issues.

Re:ummm...

[Dogtanian]

That is incorrect. Realplayer made a whole business model around compressing both audio and video enough to be vieweable as a stream over analogue modem connection.

What exactly do you think is "incorrect"? Because I never claimed that video streaming wasn't possible over a modem connection. On the contrary, I'd already specifically mentioned Real by name in my original comment!

My *actual* reply to the comment in context was:-

Because most videos back then weren't "streaming".

they [i.e. "most" - not all- "videos"] weren't "streaming" because while Joe Average was on dial-up, streaming wasn't possible at a quality most people would tolerate for anything longer than brief clips.

In other words, I know Real was around, and no-one in their right mind would want to watch clips of that quality for an extended period.

Re:ummm...

[w_dragon]

Streaming just refers to the fact that the content is downloaded faster than it plays, allowing a video to start immediately without buffering. Of course the file has to go through my computer for me to see it, but if I can watch it as it downloads then we call that streaming.

Re:ummm...

[martin-boundary]

No, streaming refers to data being sent on demand without store-and-forward. For video, it means your server broadcasts UDP packets which your player reads. If the player elects to save the packets in a buffer and delay playing them, that's still streaming. If the player accesses a file on disk, which was independently downloaded using a standard file transfer protocol, that's downloading - even if the player starts showing the data after a short time before the file is fully downloaed.

The distinction is important - streaming is an end-to-end communication directly over the network, whereas downloading can and often does involve middlemen - eg CDNs, proxies, etc. The technology stack for downloading is way more elaborate, advanced and versatile than the technology stack for streaming. The advantage of the latter is that the data is realtime, not delayed.

Re:ummm...

[Hadlock]

We didn't have video bloggers with millions of elementary, middle school and high school fans in the mid-90's. How adults in their 30's use youtube (tutorials, entertainment) is completely different than how the 9-21 year old group uses youtube. It's pretty much black and white. Things like yogscast (only example I can think of) bring in millions and millions of dollars each year for a staff of just a few. Rooster Teeth could not have existed in the mid-90s. Most people didn't have the bandwidth and/or patience to use video on the web back then. Now children spend more time on youtube than TV (or that tipping point is coming soon)

Re:ummm...

[NJRoadfan]

The first video I posted on YouTube was actually encoded and shared with friends back in 2000. Many other pre-existing meme videos were likely among the site's first uploads too. Online video was nothing new, but a site that allowed one to post it and share it (and more importantly had the bandwidth for it) was uncommon before 2005.

Re:ummm...

[drinkypoo]

No, streaming refers to data being sent on demand without store-and-forward.

No, no it doesn't. That would mean there would have been no such thing as "BUFFERING..." in realplayer. Do you even have any idea what you're saying? Not what you're talking about, we know you have no idea what you're talking about, but you also don't appear to have any idea what the words you're using mean.

For video, it means your server broadcasts UDP packets which your player reads.

Oh, never mind, you're just trolling.

Re:ummm...

[drinkypoo]

The problem was that implementation was left to each individual site, which typically sucked donkey balls.

No, the problem was that our connections sucked donkey balls. Back when realplayer was a cool thing, ISDN was a cool connection. And if you had it, and you could find a site that had decent throughput, you could watch realplayer videos without constantly buffering.

Remember, much if not most of the time you'd watch realplayer content in realplayer itself, not embedded in your browser. There were no ads playing; the browser wasn't even open.

Re:ummm...

[martin-boundary]

Sure thing, genius. Come back and play when you've actually learned what store-and-forward means. Hint: it's nothing to do with buffering...

Re:ummm...

[drinkypoo]

Sure thing, genius. Come back and play when you've actually learned what store-and-forward means. Hint: it's nothing to do with buffering...

Uh, no, that's the hint that you need. It's irrelevant what happens in the CDN. You're still going to stream it to your player. If it starts playing before you finish downloading, you're streaming. If it can do that, it's a streaming player, whether you wait for the stream to finish buffering before watching it or not. If you have to wait for the whole file to download before you can watch, then it's not streaming. There probably are still video services like that, but I don't know of any.

Whether the video gets downloaded into a buffer in memory or a buffer in a disk file is completely irrelevant to the question of whether you are streaming. It only speaks to the issue of how it is done.

Re:ummm...

[brantondaveperson]

Whereas the article, should you choose to read it, makes it perfectly clear that there was plenty of video on the internet prior to youtube.

The point it, I think, the youtube was the first one to do it that didn't suck. In a way it's sad, but very often the revolution comes along when someone suddenly decides to implement technology in a way that doesn't suck.

Re:ummm...

[martin-boundary]

Uh, no, that's the hint that you need. It's irrelevant what happens in the CDN.

It's actually far from irrelevant. The CDN is the major reason "streaming" services are viable in the first place. Without the CDNs we'd be back in the real streaming era of RealPlayer et al, right before that small company Akamai saw a business opportunity...

You're still going to stream it to your player.

Nope. Your player reads it from a growing file on disk. If you only want to concentrate on that part and call it streaming, then you've already lost the whole transporting across the network part, including controlling what gets streamed while it happens.

If it starts playing before you finish downloading, you're streaming.

Still incorrect. That's just playing a partially completed file on disk. It's "streaming" in the most primitive way possible. For example, you can't seek forward and play another part of the media until you've waited for the full file up to that point to be downloaded. True media streaming technologies allow the player to seek forward, *and not get the bits in between*. Basically, the server doesn't send any unnecessary bits, modulo the encoding method.

In your "disk as the media server" analogy, you would want to have some way to access the file randomly - that's only possible when the intermediate data has already been stored.

If you have to wait for the whole file to download before you can watch, then it's not streaming.

There you go. We seem to be in agreement after all. If you have to wait for 90% of the whole file to be downloaded before you can seek to the 90% position, then it's not streaming.

There probably are still video services like that, but I don't know of any.

There's an easy test you can perform to find out: stream a large file (large enough to take some time to download) and right at the start, have your player seek to somewhere near the end. If it starts playing the end straight away, it's probably a streming player, but if you have to wait a while, then it's probably a downloading player.

Whether the video gets downloaded into a buffer in memory or a buffer in a disk file is completely irrelevant to the question of whether you are streaming. It only speaks to the issue of how it is done.

Not so. I argue that the difference in technology is sufficiently important to the end user experience that without downloading tech, streaming media business models wouldn't have taken off - as they didn't in the early days when this was tried.

Ultimately, my point is that "streaming" as some of you use the word is a marketing term, useful to give the impression that data arrives on demand into the player and disappears as soon as it has been used, whereas this isn't the reality. True streaming like that is certainly possible and there are servers that do it, but mostly it's downloading files and hiding them. And I happen to like finding them and maybe processing them in ways that work for me.

Re:ummm...

[Solandri]

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.

Yes video was on the net before YouTube. But the problem was hosting videos. It cost $$ for the storage space a video occupied on your web server, and $$$ for the bandwidth to send it to anyone who requested it. If a site had a video on it and it went viral (either by email or IM word of mouth, or a slashdotting), you'd get the all-too-familiar "this site has exceeded its monthly bandwidth quota" page if you didn't visit it before it hit about 100,000 page hits.

I recognized what YouTube was the moment I first saw it - a way for anyone to host a video without having to own a website nor pay for bandwidth. In fact that was my main concern about YouTube's survivability at first: how were they going to make enough money to pay for all the bandwidth they used? In a way, YouTube is what made the "viral hit" possible - because it eliminated bandwidth quota exceeded messages for online videos.

Re:ummm...

[fafalone]

I remember having a movie collection on my computer years before YouTube, comparable to DVD quality using the newly developed xvid codec. As usual, piracy led the way in online distribution. I fondly remember watching in awe as I could now download a full 700MB full movie in a minute or two over my university connection in 2003, remembering it taking longer when I did it at home over cable at home. By late 2004 I had 260 dvd-quality movies in 700MB or 1.4GB XviD format (can't believe hypermart still lets me view my ancient site where I uploaded that list)... the year before YouTube first came out. It was inevitable that video would be more easily accessible via the web, but as always, YT's legit offering was far lower quality than us evil pirates were already used to.

Re:ummm...

[AmiMoJo]

Yeah, I remember occasionally watching very (*very*) low resolution Real Video and similar clips over a dial-up connection circa the late 90s.

I remember "buffering...", but don't recall actually ever seeing a video play.

Re:ummm...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

It's semistreaming. It buffers video, sure, but the buffer is blown out.

Your use case for YouTube reminds me of RMS browsing the web via email

For example, I don't need a 3 year backlog of the Vlogbrothers stuff. I simply don't. I'd rather just watch them via YouTube. It's impractical to keep a backlog of videos I'll watch maybe once or twice.

Re:ummm...

[pnutjam]

Well, with your own test, youtube is streaming. You can skip to the end of the file. If you try to download the file you will get a video fragment starting at the point you skipped forward to.

Re:ummm...

[Dogtanian]

Dial-up was already very rare by that time. There were already more 'broadband' (or at least, what was understood by that term at that time) connections than dial-up accounts around 2001.

Perhaps you're suffering from selection bias, either from your peer group, socioeconomic group or area. Or perhaps you're simply forgetting what time all this happened.

I'm afraid you'll have to take it on trust, but these were literally the first two meaningful results (from different sources) that I clicked on when I did an image search for a graph:-

Home Broadband vs. Dialup (American adults, 2000 to 2013) - Source: Pew Internet

Web Connection Speed Trends - US - Source: Nielsen (After noting that some others were taken from the same Pew Internet source, this was the first I found that apparently wasn't).

These figures are for the United States- although I live in Scotland, I never had the impression that the United States was that different to the situation here, and this essentially confirms that belief.

In short, this backs up what I said even more accurately than I'd ever intended the original statement to be. Yes, broadband *was* around in the late 90s (as I was already aware), but only a small proportion of domestic users had it back then. It was 2004-05 (*not* 2001) before it reached around 50% in the US, and I'd say Scotland (and the rest of the UK) were somewhat similar there.

YouTube survives solely because of Google

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Site for users to post video

[globaljustin]

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

Youngster.

[xenoc_1]

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.

Re:Youngster.

[wiredlogic]

Probably don't get what either of the two basic meaning of "Tube" in YouTube mean either.

It's about the internet right?

--TS

Re:Youngster.

[xenoc_1]

Yep. Certified Old Fart here.

Re:Youngster.

[TechyImmigrant]

Probably don't get what either of the two basic meaning of "Tube" in YouTube mean either.

It's about the internet right?

--TS

The internet is just a series of electron accelerating glass vacuum chambers with a phosphorescent lining on the other end to the electron source.
 

there was no revolution.

[nimbius]

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.

Re:there was no revolution.

[TapeCutter]

I agree, YT was not a revolution in itself, it was just one of the fruits of the 1990's communications revolution. Like so many things YT is what you make of it, for instance I have used it mainly to listen to people such as Feynman, listen to long retired/dead politicians, listen to music I already know. I've never heard of the YT music awards. My front page is filled with pages I have subscribed to, the YT recommendations are nearly always related to something I recently watched, if YT can't figure out who I am then of course it will feed me Taylor Swift and the Kardashians (or whoever happens to be popular at the time).

Having said that, I think people are misinterpreting "The revolution will not be televised", it's a well known phrase from the 70's, it comes from a poem/song that expresses the same concerns expressed in your post (ie: the 0.01% will control what you see and hear, they will not allow a political revolution to propagate via mass media). I think the phrase itself was inspired by another phrase from the late 60's The whole world is watching, was a chant that erupted from a crowd of protesters that were attacked by the riot police in front of TV cameras. It subsequently became a well known slogan of the anti-war movement, the establishment angst about filming police "at work" still persists to this day but mandatory police body-cams are slowly changing that attitude.

Internert video

[future assassin]

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?...

Oops....success

[Bob_Who]

Success justifies all luck. Powerball, anyone?

Re:Oops....success

[El_Oscuro]

Nah, Powerball jumpped the shark when they went to $2 a bet. Mega Millions is still $1, so you can bet 2 numbers for each Powerball one. Sure the jackpots are bigger, but I would rather have 2 chances of winning $100m over 1 of winning $200m

It succeeeded due to it's copyright infringment

[blahbooboo]

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.

Re:It succeeeded due to it's copyright infringment

[sound vision]

Gitmo was in full swing years before YouTube came online.

The Revolution (DIVX) was ~1998/1999

[burni2]

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!

Re:The Revolution (DIVX) was ~1998/1999

[martin-boundary]

Oh yeah! And when she was buffering it was totally in tune with the rythm of her music, too!

Noble origins

[Snufu]

"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.

20 years, not 10.

[SeaFox]

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.

Re:20 years, not 10.

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Pff

[beanpoppa]

IIRC, Google Video (in it's initial incarnation, contemporary to shortly after YouTube launched) did not host the videos. It merely indexed videos on other sites, and gave a better portal to viewing them.

Re: Pff

[hviezda14]

You could upload videos to google video, it is search portal only now. In past, it was similar to youtube.