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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!
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.
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.
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".