Flash Flood: the (very Short) Story of YouTube
On top of that move, YouTube videos quickly caught on with another fast-growing Internet community as MySpace users started embedding videos in their personal pages. On top of that, site owners often had bandwidth caps on their accounts, and you didn't need to download a 100-megabyte video too many times to run into those limits. Uploading videos was almost as easy as watching them, as long as your material fit inside the 10-minute and 100-megabyte box that YouTube provided you in the early days. That's right: in 2004, there was no YouTube. There were low bandwidth caps … At the time of the Google buyout, Entrepreneur Magazine reported that YouTube was spending $1 million a month on bandwidth bills, as users were uploading 65,000 videos and watching 100 million clips daily. YouTube is probably the site you think of first when you're looking for videos to watch online, or when you need to host your own clips. YouTube was not the first video hosting service on the Web, and we could argue all day over whether it was the best.
A sweepstakes contest doling out an Apple a day was possibly the smartest move YouTube made in the early days. On the back of growth phenomena like these, YouTube exploded from a good idea to a million video views a day in just a few months. On weekends, YouTube skips past Yahoo! If you want to share a clip with the world, you can go to YouTube or MySpace TV, DailyMotion or Metacafe, Vimeo or Truveo-and the list goes on and on. But co-founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim kickstarted the site with some solid business ideas that quickly made it the obvious choice for would-be clip publishers and video watchers. Video hosting is now a very mature field with lots of consumer choice and its own set of conventions and traditions. Indeed, Flash was popular long before it became the industry standard handler for online video streams. Playback Just Worked (TM) as long as you had the Adobe Flash player installed.
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YouTube's servers do the dirty work of converting the file to the .FLV format that Flash likes to play, and you're done. YouTube came along in early 2005, and changed how we use the Internet in an instant. YouTube was Slashdotted in August, 2005, and co-founder Jawed Karim took that as an early sign of breaking through to the masses. Moreover, many of the most popular pieces of YouTube content were copyrighted works like official music videos and clips from TV shows like Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central. Users collected entries in the drawing by posting more videos and inviting new users, and the $250 iPod Nano had enough trendy cachet and monetary weight to become a real incentive. No more codec headaches or download-and-watch roundabouts, and it was a simple installation that would also let you play Bookworm and Bedazzled, among other things. But YouTube brought a lot of new things to the table. But in this seemingly unending cornfield of choices, YouTube is the cob that rises far above the rest. While the site did have some serious advertising partners like NBC and Warner Music Group, the advertising revenue fell far short of covering the costs.
Back in 2004, finding video content online wasn't as quick and easy as searching your favorite video site and blasting away. First, you had to find the files you wanted and download them, then hope that you had the correct audio and video codecs installed to be able to watch the darn thing in Windows Media Player, Quicktime, or RealPlayer. You could find clips scattered across websites, FTP shares, peer-to-peer networking services like KaZaA, Gnutella, or relative newcomer BitTorrent, but it was a multistep process that left much to be desired. 0.01 per video watched, which doesn't sound like much until you multiply it by 3 billion showings a month. You might feel like access to online video clips is one of those "inalienable rights" you hear so much about. Meanwhile, broadband access was coming into its own and the ever-increasing power of modern chips from Intel and AMD was begging for a video workout on your desktop. But digital video cameras were coming down in price and going up in popularity. Remember when video on the Internet was painful? The Internet of 2009 is awash in video content, from your favorite Seinfeld episodes to homemade videos of cats playing the piano-and everything in between.
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