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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
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.
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.
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.