1. Welcome to YouTube
You've been there. You've seen it. You know that YouTube is hot—because it's cool. That's why you like it.
But what makes YouTube so cool—and so hot? It's all about videos, and about sharing them.
YouTube—Video Sharing 4 Everyone
YouTube's motto is "Broadcast Yourself." (It's there in the logo, as you can see in Figure 1.1.) Technically, that means YouTube is a video sharing site that lets users upload and view all sorts of video clips online. The site has become a repository for literally millions of movie clips, TV clips (both current and classic), music videos, and home videos. The most popular YouTube videos quickly become "viral," getting passed around from email to email and linked to from other sites and blogs on the web. If a YouTube video is particularly interesting, you'll see it pop up virtually everywhere, from TV's The Daily Show to the front page of your favorite website.
Figure 1.1. YouTube's motto: Broadcast Yourself. (It's trademarked!)
All of those videos and all of that sharing make YouTube one of the hottest sites on the Internet today—and one of the largest and fastest-growing. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, YouTube consistently ranks in the top 10 of all websites, with close to 20 million visitors per month. And those visitors are watching a lot of videos; USA Today reports that more than 100 million clips are viewed on the site each day, with more than 65,000 new videos uploaded every 24 hours.
What makes YouTube so appealing? Most users would say, "the videos." But how do those videos get there? It's the sharing aspect of the site that defines its success; YouTube visitors can both consume and contribute the videos that make up the site.
And whether you're watching or uploading those videos, YouTube is an easy site to use. Finding a video is as easy as searching or browsing; watching a video requires nothing more than the click of a Play button; and uploading a video isn't much more difficult than attaching a file to an email message. The site itself does all the heavy lifting in terms of technology—the conversion of uploaded videos to a standard format, the provision of necessary hard disk space and bandwidth to host the videos, and the serving of the videos at the push of the proverbial button. YouTube even lets you send links to its videos to your friends and family via email, and host those links on your own website or blog. And it's all extraordinarily easy.
In April 2005, Forbes magazine estimated that YouTube consumed 200 terabytes of bandwidth per day—easily costing more than $1 million per month. That was when the site had half the traffic it currently has; figure at least double those numbers today.
So whether you like to watch or like to share, YouTube gives you what you want, the way you want it. That's why it's so successful.
How It All Started: The History of YouTube
YouTube is so pervasive and so innovative that it was named Invention of the Year by Time magazine in 2006. That's not too bad for a site that first came to life only the year before.
YouTube was conceived by three former employees of PayPal—Chad Hurley, Steven Chen, and Jawed Karim. With some PayPal bucks in their pockets, the three friends were looking for a new business opportunity and realized that there was a real need for a service that facilitated the process of uploading, watching, and sharing videos. Hence the development of YouTube.
The trio registered the domain name YouTube.com on February 15, 2005, and then started developing the technology for the site—in Hurley's garage. Chen, the programmer of the bunch, worked with Adobe's Flash development language to stream video clips inside a web browser. Hurley, a user interface expert, adopted the concept of "tags" to let users identify and share the videos they liked. Together, they came up with a way to let users paste video clips onto their own web pages (and, most importantly, on their MySpace pages), which expanded the reach the site.
The development work done, a public beta test version of the site went live in May 2005. After a few months of working the kinks out of the site, YouTube was officially launched in December 2005.
That's when things really started cooking.
The three former "PayPals" had done their homework; the site proved immensely popular from virtually the first day in business. As you can see in Figure 1.2, site traffic that first month was 3 million visitors, which is pretty good for a startup. The number of visitors tripled by the third month (February), tripled again by July (to 30 million visitors), and reached 38 million visitors by the end of the site's first year in business. That made YouTube one of the top 10 sites on the web, period—and one of the fastest-growing websites in history.
Figure 1.2. YouTube unique visitors per month, as reported by Nielsen/NetRatings (www.nielsen-netratings.com).
That kind of growth didn't escape the notice of the big boys. In fact, one of the biggest boys in the dot-com biz decided that YouTube was ripe for the taking; in October 2006, Google acquired YouTube, paying $1.65 billion in Google stock. That made for a nice little payday for YouTube's founding fathers.
Even though YouTube is now part of the Google conglomerate, the site continues to operate independently. That's a good thing for YouTube users; the site looks and acts the same today as it did in the pre-Google days.
Today, YouTube has about 70 employees; Chad Hurley is CEO (chief executive officer) and Steven Chen is CTO (chief technical officer). The company's main offices are in San Mateo, California.
And, you might ask, how does YouTube make money—especially because it's totally free to both watch and upload videos? YouTube's revenues come the old-fashioned way—by selling advertising on the site. Interestingly, the site didn't generate much revenue before it was purchased by Google; Google's advertising services were a big help to YouTube, adding targeted banner ads to the site. This is one instance where an acquisition truly added value to the company being acquired!
Co-founder Jawed Karim left YouTube in 2005 to pursue an advanced degree at Stanford University.
Videos, Videos, and More Videos: What's On YouTube
What can you find on the YouTube site? It's safe to say that just about any kind of video you're interested in, YouTube has it—or something like it.
Many videos on YouTube are the Internet equivalent of America's Funniest Home Videos, amateur videos of everything from birthday parties to Jackass-style stunts. Anybody with a video camera can easily upload home movies to YouTube and make them available for the whole world to see.
Other videos on YouTube are decidedly more professional. Budding film professionals can post their work on YouTube, which essentially converts the site into a giant repository of filmmakers' resumes. Student films, independent videos, acting and directing tryouts—they're all there.
Then there is the category of "video blog," or vlog. This is a video version of the traditional text-based blog, a personal journal typically captured via webcam and posted to YouTube on a regular basis. Most video bloggers post new entries on a regular basis—or when they have something particularly interesting to say.
YouTube is also a repository for "historical" items. We're talking old television commercials, music videos, clips from classic television shows, you name it. Want to revisit your childhood and watch an old Maypo commercial? Several are on YouTube. How about a clip of the Ronettes performing on Hullaballoo? Or the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show? Or your favorite episode of the old Speed Racer cartoon? They're all there, believe it or not. YouTube is a great site for nostalgia buffs, collectors, and the like.
Speaking of music videos, there is no better site on the web to find your favorite video clips. In fact, YouTube has announced that it hopes to offer every music video ever created and is in talks with Warner Music Group, EMI, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and other record labels to make this happen. That makes YouTube a great place to promote hot new music and bands. If you're a music lover, you'll love YouTube.
A lot of current television content is also on the YouTube site. Although not every television network agrees that YouTube is a valid promotional medium (meaning that some networks have asked YouTube to pull their content), many clips from popular TV shows are still on the site—plus movie trailers, promotional videos, and similar items. YouTube is a TV and movie lover's dream.
So what's on YouTube tonight? As you can see, a little bit of everything!
How YouTube Works
The seemingly simple serving of so many videos is actually a complex endeavor. It only looks easy.
Users upload videos to YouTube in either QuickTime, AVI, or MPEG file formats. YouTube then converts these video files into Flash FLV format—which is how the videos are served to YouTube users. (To view YouTube videos in your web browser, you must have Macromedia Flash Player—version 7 or later—installed.) All the videos are stored on YouTube's servers, which are hosted by Limelight Networks—a leading provider of content-hosting and streaming media solutions.
YouTube uses Flash technology with the Sorenson Spark H.263 video codec. YouTube videos are recompressed at a lower bitrate than the original submissions so that they download and play faster for most viewers. Audio is mono.
When you access a YouTube video, the video begins streaming to your computer. When enough of the video has streamed to create a sufficient "buffer," playback begins.
Because YouTube utilizes streaming video technology, the file itself is not saved to your hard disk. That's because streaming video is different from downloading a complete video file. When you download a file, you can't start playing that file until it is completely downloaded to your PC. With streaming video, however, playback can start before an entire file is downloaded; the first part of the file is present on your PC while the last part is still downloading. It makes for almost-immediate video playback, especially if you have a broadband Internet connection—which means immediate gratification for YouTube viewers!