Has it only been five years? Yes, it has only been five years. The site that has become synonymous with video on the web, the site that sparked so many delightful internet memes, turns five years old today. Whether it’s the best line in video game history repeated a million times over, or the most beautiful piece of art ever created in human history (the lesser-known HD version, of course), YouTube has it all.
Of course, YouTube gets lots of laughs for all the crazy content you can find there – but apart from the obvious lack of hard core porn, would we really want it any other way? Isn’t YouTube really the perfect representation of what the internet is all about (except for the lack of porn, that is)? Sharing stuff with the world – no matter how crazy or ridiculous it is?
“Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world,” the YouTube team writes, “Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself.”
I’m fairly sure the world would be a much bleaker place without YouTube and all the competing sites it spawned. I mean really, would you want an internet without this? Seven months, 25 million views, baby, so I know y’all agree with me. Writing this item took a lot longer than usual simply because I watched this one like 10 times.
Seriously now, YouTube has carved a very special place for itself in the internet, and it hosts not only cute kitten videos, but also boatloads of music videos that would otherwise have become lost in MTV’s archives (seriously – does MTV still exist? I’m genuinely interested). It does HD, film studios upload their stuff, and god knows what else. More importantly though – it has given people a soapbox for more important matters, like the recent unrest in Iran.
“What started as a site for bedroom vloggers and viral videos has evolved into a global platform that supports HD and 3D, broadcasts entire sports seasons live to 200+ countries,” the team details, “We bring feature films from Hollywood studios and independent filmmakers to far-flung audiences. Activists document social unrest seeking to transform societies, and leading civic and political figures stream interviews to the world.”
It started with this, the first ever YouTube video, and it has become one of the most popular sites on the web. Two billion views every day, 24 hours of video uploaded every minute – figures that go way over your head.
And you know what’s the craziest thing about all this? YouTube is only five years old, but it already feels like such an integral part of society that makes it seem as if YouTube has been around for a lot longer. Yes, I know it’s cool in geek circles to look down on youTube, but I don’t care: YouTube is awesome, and I hope they’ll be here for a lot longer. YouTube is minxy!
Of course, if they don’t go with an open codec, I will have to retroactively delete this story.
Or the genocide of Palestinians.
Or the “recent unrest” in Thailand perhaps?
It brought us a new low standard in comment quality!
YouTube comments are like walking into a restaurant and announcing loudly to everybody that the restaurant is a fake, and they should all go and die in a fire.
I don’t know what it is about YouTube that makes people want to be so utterly offensive at the drop of a hat.
It has done many good things though. It has forced ISPs to upgrade their networks. It has made video cheap and viable on the web for everybody and it’s given the fat cats a run for their money.
Now we have to just get rid of the DMCA crap and uphold user’s rights to fair use.
Yeah popular videos have really annoying comments (Like: I wanna **** your **** and **** all over your ****), but the down voting helps a lot.
BUT on my pretty special fishy tank videos I get really nice comments, so as a good (or any) lawyer would say “It depends”.
You are an aquarist too? Thumbs up!
I think I do. It was youtube’s initial target audience: teenage gamers and hipsters. I remember when I was first exposed to it by my then girlfriend’s teenage sister, back in 2005. She was watching a World of Warcraft PvP video (we all played it back then). The comments were 99% teenage player-hater crap and the rest were a few folks legitimately commenting on the tactics shown in the video. I was approaching 30 years old then, and I felt like an old curmudgeon as I read what the teenagers were saying to one another.
Given how our youth has regressed in maturity since then — today’s twentysomethings act like teens did in my own youth — the “Youtube Generation” never really grew up. They are stuck in an immaturity loop that appears to be lasting them into their late 20s and beyond.
Like this:
http://xkcd.com/202/
(obligatory xkcd comic)
Agreed. Ars Technica recently had a story about bad DMCA takedowns. It’s kind of scary that someone could probably get almost any YouTube video taken down without any evidence and without any penalty.
Youtube videos have comments?
LOL, this made my day
And I totally agree.
rofl Kroc, you just made my migraine-ridden morning a LOT easier! The restaurant analogy was friggin funny, need some wipes for my coffee-splattered screen!
I don’t know if anyone remember how it was like before youtube, but it was almost impossible to find some videos on the internet, for example I remember that I had to use p2p software like emule to search for videos of gymnastic or stuff like that, and most of the time I couldn’t find anything
I’ve never looked down on Youtube. There is almost nothing else like it in the internet. I can look for the most obscure video about anything and someone has already uploaded it. I can look for a theme song to a show I liked in the 80’s and find it on youtube. That’s cool.
I was watching some old shows from my childhood, it’s amazing what’s available, especially the stuff sourced from VHS.
Just watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlM3k-4m0GI (3 parts) for just how awesome British TV was in the ’90s. Considering how mainstream gaming is now (compared to then) it’s really surprising that there still exists no TV programming for computer games these days—an example where it really was better in the past.
And there’s something special about ’90s CGI that isn’t replicated these days
There are TV shows for games….. The hosts are simply obnoxious morons.
We have a few in Australia, the first one was “good game”, on the ABC.
In the Netherlands we have “Game Kings”. The hosts define a new standard of “cool”.
There are programs on Bravo and probably Channel 4/5 at very odd hours.
I don’t think we will ever see anything like Games Master on telly again. There are few issues really:
* on mainstream TV, gaming is seen as only being for children and most decent games are not suitable for children or children’s tv.
* mainstream TV is too politically correct. Encouraging children to play computer games (even “U” rated) is not seen as politically correct.
* a telly program would have to compete against all the various gaming websites/portals, the publishers own websites, YouTube and gaming itself (who’s going to watch Dominic Diamond when they could be playing GTA?).
BTW, does anyone remember the gaming/computing program on BBC kids TV? I remember they had an SGI mini computer on it in one episode.
Edited 2010-05-18 13:19 UTC
Sounds like Bad Influence. http://www.bad-influence.co.uk/series1.htm, but not on BBC. It did have an episode with a SGI box though…
Edited 2010-05-18 13:47 UTC
“Back in my day we didn’t have no fancy World Wide Web, we recorded fast moving text off of the TV onto analogue magnetic tape and played it back slowly.”
I shall enjoy bitching when I’m old.
Yeah, it’s a different world now. In the 90’s you waited until 5pm to know what the news was. Kids TV occupied only 2 hours on two channels during weekdays and your only source of information for gaming was magazines. TV shows like GamesMaster and Bad Influence were “magazine”-like shows designed to briefly cover a wide range of what was going on in the industry as besides magazines and adverts there was no other source of information for the public! Crazy to think.
Games journalism is better now I think. With the amateur blogger being able to rip apart an official channel’s work—and garner attention, the platform is open for anybody to write anything insightful if they can and want to. The problem with GamesMaster and Bad Influence in light of now is that it’s too shallow, simply rating a game on the very trivial of things.
If there were to be a good computer games show in this day and age, it would have to know its stuff well enough to talk with an authority that makes it stand out against the web. Inversely, that’s why I like to read Edge.
When people come over for a party, Youtube is always on. I’ve only recently heard of spotify, but I’m in Canada so I don’t get it, but you can listen to just about any obscure song you want on YouTube, and you often get crazy/funny videos to boot! What could be better. As a musician, many of my friends and I are music geeks (or historians if you prefer ;-), and we can sometimes go for hours looking up songs on youtube, from the sublime to the ridiculous and everywhere in between. Before Youtube we had to wade through crap on limewire, often get the wrong tune, it takes a while to find a better one, we’ll never listen to most of this stuff again, and someone has to continually man the download queue to make sure there’s something to listen to when the playing song is done. YouTube is not only way better for these types of games, I’m not going to get sued for using it!
Happy Birthday YouTube!
And many more….
Check out my robot video
http://www.youtube.com/macinnisrr#p/u/2/cQtVCHEUXJs
(and hell yes, I’m spamming! What else would you expect from DickMacInnis.com)
Edited 2010-05-17 18:28 UTC
I think youtube was one of the things that spawned the ‘information diarrhea’ of the internet, which allowed non-technical people to publish content too easy. Because of this there is no real quality control which degrades internet experience.
I do not use flash so I cannot view any of the video, but I really have not missed anything I think. But then again I liked the internet the way it was a couple of years ago when there was no nonsense about clouds etc.
You don’t need flash for most YouTube videos. If your using Chrome, Safari, or Wild Fox, you can view the HTML5 version by going here: http://www.youtube.com/html5
Yes I read about it, maybe I will try that out later if they have support for firefox without proprietary codecs. That was actually the whole thing that got me annoyed at flash, because it forced me to use a binary blob (which was not even 64bit) and not FOSS.
Also there is a nifty Qt application out there called Minitube that takes a different approach on YouTube: it offers a TV-like viewing experience by stacking videos based on your search which kind of works like YouTube’s own automatic reproduction (or whatever it is called). It streams the MPEG4/AVC content directly bypassing the need for Flash which greatly enhances playback performance – to the point that my crappy laptop can play fullscreen YouTube videos using Minitube whereas it can barely play regular YouTube through the Flash player on the browser window without a lot of lag and frameskipping.
Unfortunately it is a bit immature for the time being and hangs a lot but the developer seems to be fairly responsive to inquiries and release newer versions frequently. It is definitely worth a look if you’re a YouTube addict and don’t want – or can’t – have Flash installed on your Linux system.
If you’re in linux, you can view flash videos by downloading: gecko-mediaplayer and the greasemonkey script: Youtube without flash auto.
This will enable you to view the videos using the gecko-mediaplayer.
Edited 2010-05-18 01:16 UTC
… gonna give you up,
never gonna let you down …
What gets me about a lot of the big popular sites these days (Youtube and Twitter come to mind) is how they can run for years without any income, costing mind boggling amounts to run, and then getting sold without ever making a dime for millions/billions (Only recently are either testing ads for some piddly income).
When I think of a new website, I try to think of how it’s actually going to support itself at some point instead of finding tons of magic money from thin air to run it and pay myself and a staff for years without a business plan… I think I’m doing it wrong.
I had read “minxy” on this site a few days ago and dictionary.com told me it wasn’t an English word so I was wondering what it meant; now I’m a little more educated 🙂
When I read this and followed the link, I ended up, after a few minutes of watching the video, wondering whether you were referring to the song, the show or… the singer…
This particular performance, Fiona singing Elvis Costello’s “I Want You” with Elvis on the guitar, is the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced. I’m not joking. I’m dead serious.
Even Elvis himself said of this performance that Fiona did a better job performing the song than he ever could – and that’s probably the biggest compliment you could give to someone covering your material.
You can find almost anything on YouTube. It ranges from absolute rubbish to some wildly improbable gems.
To illustrate this, I’d personally nominate the following clip being as beautiful as anything you are ever likely to come across, any time, anywhere, and it is all the more surprising because it is performed by an Australian:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkY9HtwXNU8
You can find almost anything, however improbable, on YouTube.
Edited 2010-05-19 11:47 UTC