I recently saw a "retrospective" on YouTube and was quite surprised to learn that it is only 10 years old. Given how ubiquitous it is, it seems like it should be much older than that - perhaps not as old as the digital watch, but still definitely older than 10 years.
I still recall my first digital watch. I probably got it some time in the mid to late 1970's. It was small and square and ugly with rounded corners - sort of like a iPhone is now, so Jobs wasn't the original genius everyone pretends he is. The LCD display was very small and the functionality was controlled by a single button with an inset set button. I was pretty proud of it at the time; within a few years it was the kind of watch that was given away in a box of cereal.
The first video uploaded and available for public viewing on YouTube was Me at the Zoo on April 23, 2005. The retrospective included a sidenote that YouTube's original incantation was as a dating video site. Perhaps this is related to the origins of YouTube being on Valentines day of the same year. If true, I'm glad the video dating site concept ended up in the dustbin - although I'm sure that concept exists now.
My initiation to YouTube was probably not too much later than that original video when a friend sent me a link to a video of a guy crashing his new helicopter. I recall poking around to see what YouTube was, and thought the concept was intriguing. The over-sharing world was just getting going in 2005 so the immensity of the concept was hard to grasp. I can't help but wonder what happened to the guy in the helicopter. The passenger compartment does not seem to have fared very well.
According to currently available statistics, YouTube has about 1 billion users - nearly 1/7th of the world's population and 1/3rd of the internet population. I'm not sure if this is real, as I have to wonder how many of those are 'bots and how many are people who have multiple user accounts. I also wonder if that includes unregistered lurkers? Regardless, there are a lot of people watching YouTube.
There are approximately 500 hours of content uploaded every minute, which means more content is uploaded in 60 hours than was done in 60-years by the big broadcast networks. This is not entirely true, since much of the network content ends up on the cutting room floor. Much of the content on YouTube should be as well, and there is a startling amount of redundant material on YouTube as well. YouTube has done a good job of the democratization of crap.
What gets staggering is the amount of space all these video's take up. If we assume an hour of video uses about 10GB of space, that means 5TB of data every minute. Much of the video on YouTube is lower quality and compression is actually much better than this, but even if it takes only 10% of this, the amount of digital space this takes is frightening. It wasn't that long ago when memory was hundreds of dollars per megabyte and disk space was 10'sof dollars per megabyte.
Again, the democratization of crap.
And I've contributed my own crap to this heap. My paltry contribution consists of some 30ish videos which have been collectively watched about 1200 times. Stanley Kubrick I am not.
I've previously maligned the hopeless situation of current copyright law trying to deal with the democratization of crap. I don't think this situation will be resolved any time soon. Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton have pledged to take a look at this "from day one!"
Still, the ability to strip the audio off of existing YouTube videos is a great functionality. I'm sure it would never be used to flagrantly abuse copyright claims.
YouTube video ads are much more intrusive than they used to be, but I guess content owners and Google need to make money somehow. I'm going to agree with Tim Kreider that Content Creator is a rather vulgar euphemism for creative types. Another manifestation of the democratization of crap.
So YouTube now brings us full movies and full TV shows ... for a cost. Along with brethren Hulu and Amazon, no real need to have cable anymore unless sports are critical to watch in real-time. It is even possible to watch what Family Guy called "The gayest music video of all time" or watch American Dad, um, investigate the Cheetos aisle.
Of course, people like me who are fortunate enough to live in an area so rural that there is no DSL or cable internet access are not fortunate enough to be able to stream gobs of video. Damn the data caps! "That should be criminal," screamed the IT guy at work. I guess this is also a factor of me being cheap, since even if I go over my limit, the cost isn't exactly prohibitive financially.
It is actually pretty hard to imagine a world without YouTube now. In addition to being entertaining, YouTube is a mechanic, a chef, teacher, maybe even a pilot, but hopefully not like that guy in the helicopter.
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