YouTube

toc =Introduction=

The NY Times voted YouTube as the best invention of the year. It has given the ability for users to create, educate, entertain, humor, and shock on an international level. The concept is simple, create a web based program which allows users to upload video content and share it with an online community. YouTube is just two years old and already boasts 70,000 videos uploaded a day, 20 million visitors a month, and advertising revenue in the millions (NY Times). The unprecedented success relies on the users of YouTube who make the content and the word of mouth advertising it recieves.

=History=



YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim whom were all former employees of Paypal. They left their jobs in pursuit of creating a video sharing website. The early stages involved the three working out of their basement on a project that seemed uncertain. Eventually the domain name YouTube was purchased by February 15th, 2006. After spending several months of coding, testing, documenting, and recieving investor capital YouTube released a site preview. It was an instant success and six months later YouTube made its official debut.

After several months of its release YouTube had reached a level of internet phenoneom. Users were intrigued by a free uploading video service and thus thousands of new videos began surfacing each day. This put YouTube in a situation of immense popularity and consequently viewers demanded more bandwidth and server space. Initial investors such as Sequoia Capital (original investment of 8 million) contributed more to fuel YouTube's growth. The success and growth did not go without notice. In particular notice from networks who's content was being freely viewed and distributed through YouTube. Thus, lawsuits were made and although networks were hostile at first, strategic partnerships were eventually formed.

YouTube was aquired by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock. Google will combine its Google video service with YouTube to create a better service for uploading, downloading and watching videos on the Internet. Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube and CEO made this comment when the partnership was established. "Our community has played a vital role in changing the way that people consume media, creating a new clip culture. By joining forces with Google, we can benefit from its global reach and technology leadership to deliver a more comprehensive entertainment experience for our users and to create new opportunities for our partners" (Google 2006). This shows that Hurley believes they can expand to a greater market by using Google's vast amounts of advanced technology and expertise.

This buy out has left many uneasy, while some view it as ridiculous, others see the more obvious reason for google's decision, which is to control online video content.

=Implications of YouTube=

Allowing users to freely upload video content on a medium so easily accessible as the internet definitly has a magnitude of social, political, and economical implications.

Social
The content of YouTube is ultimately comprised of the user purpose. Posting videos is a fairly personal experience, one can even call it a form of expression. People often post music videos, personal videos, blogs, events, news, all which somehow reflect upon themselves. At the same time YouTube while serving as a video uploading service also acts as an online community. Communities are comprised of individuals and people have different perspectives on politics, entertainment, morals, ethics, and etc. Thus, there have always been issues about what is deemed inappropriate and what is not. While blatant pornography is flagged down as a "no no," other issues like violence in context to "Iraq" are deemed questionable. Where is the line to be drawn? Particular issues were raised when British School boys began posting fights and bullying of other children on YouTube. You Tube also functions by bringing together on one forum videos and experiences from users of different cultures and countries. One can find documentaries of Osama bin Laden, the wedding of the Burmese dictator's daughter, to videos reflective of contemporary pop culture such as Borat, standup comedy and even Indian talk shows. It also enhances the use of different categories to ease the browsing experience and to cater to specific preferences such as science and technology, arts and animation, comedy and so on.

Economical
Interestingly, since the purchase of YouTube by Google, YouTube.com is currently being sued by www.utube.com because of misdirected traffic that keeps crashing thier site. The lawsuit asks YouTube to either change thier domain name or reimburse utube.com. It is already unknown how the recent purchase by Google will affect users, but if youtube.com were able to win such a court case, it is possible that users of YouTube may loose thier free privileges of the site. This, in turn, would create a greater divide between the people who can actually access the internet with the people who could afford to use the site if it were no longer free.

Despite the facts mentioned above YouTube has recently made strategic partnerships with NBC, CBS, Warner, Universal Group, and Sony BMG to display their content on YouTube. Initially these corporations sued YouTube for having their copywrighted material displayed. In most instances the material was quickly removed without further infractions. However, these companies realized the potential that YouTube offered. Thus, NBC and CBS both made deals for YouTube to promote their popular shows such as Lost, The Office, Prison Break, and etc. Warner, Universal, and Sony BMG offered their music content to be used as both audio and video. The potential lies with the extermely high site traffic and the fact that users use YouTube to find out more about their favorite shows, music, and artists. This in turn has craeted a win win relationship for YouTube and corporations.

Individual users have also taken the opportunity to make strategic partnerships. Popular channels (a term regarding people with high viewing) have been offered advertising deals from local and multinational companies. These channels endorse products in the form of clips, product placement, or any other means in return for dollar amounts. This of course works better if you have an average of 50,000 views per posting versus someone who simply has 200 viewers. The fact is, advertisment and our need for money can definitly change the face of YouTube to a bombardment of advertising.

Political
YouTube has unknowingly become an excellent source for the archival of political footage and a great tool for sending out political messages to a broader audience. For example, Michael J. Fox's advertisement for Democrat Claire McCaskill would have not become an international sensation had it not been for its inclusion on YouTube, where it gained an unforeseen audience. Thus what was once a rather localized advertisement for Missouri turned into a huge national debate regarding stem cell research and Fox's battle with Parkinson's Disease. To put in perspective, just one version of this Michael J. Fox advertisement on YouTube currently stands with over 2,140,000 views. See: [|Michael J. Fox Ad] In addition, YouTube has become a platform for people all around the world to express their political standpoints, for example seen with the many home-edited videos uploaded to the site depicting various hypocrocies and inconsistencies of the American President's speeches during the Iraq war.

YouTube - A New Media Source
Since it's creation, YouTube has become one of the most visited website on today's Internet. It's growing popularity has turned it into a source of media to the people. YouTube has all kinds of videos, and it is just like watching television. Attention was drawn to YouTube through an incident which a footage of Saturday Night Live was uploaded. Thousands visited the website to view the video. This incident also created issues on copyrighted materials that were being uploaded on the website. A good example of how YouTube has become a new media source is probably best described through an incident where footage of two men arguing on a bus in Hong Kong was captured and uploaded onto YouTube. The footage caught manys attention, even the media itself in Hong Kong was drawn to the new found excitment. It did not take long until the footage became a huge story and was on local news, newspapers, radio shows and magazines.

More to Consider...
What really makes YouTube a success is it's great design. The fundamental ability to share peoples exerpiences, memories,opinions, beliefs, from all cultures on to a single website is what makes YouTube truly magnificent. To better understand YouTube's success let us analyze it in context to what we have learned in the course.

**Effectiveness**
Does YouTube do what it's suppose to do? Yes it does. It allows for easy upload of video, viewing/streaming, and almost on any web browser. However, the conceptualization of YouTube, which at the time may have been just an excellent way to share videos with anyone around the world has definitly changed. From the user perspective, YouTube is a tool for a a variety of functions. Users have posted controversial video against popular belief, shared their joys, illustrated their greif, or simply told their story. The YouTube user is not limited by age, race, gender, or profession. There are a mulititude of individuals using YouTube for their own personal reasons, from the teenager who blogs everyday after school to the retired science professor offering free online tutorials. In some cases YouTube celebrities have become so reknowned that it has landed them a career, such was the case of Brooke Brodak and her deal with NBC. The fact of the matter is, YouTube provides itself as a medium of communication and it does this extremely well. Users, however, are the ones which facilitate the direction and content.

Efficiency
The process of uploading videos is fairly structured. Before posting, the video must be reviewed and deemed appopriate by administrators. This can take several days to weeks, which is understandable considering 70,000 videos are uploaded a day. Nonetheless, this can be cumbersome for the eager poster. Efficiency can be questionable because some of the videos are extremely pixilated. YouTube succeeds since most of its videos can be viewed in popular web browsers such as Firefix, Internet Explorer, Safari, and etc. In respect to how fast you download, that is subjective to user bandwidth. Ultimately, the user deems efficiency as having videos which are posted available for viewing upon demand. This wasn't the case when YouTube had to pull down all of the Torina Winter Olypmpic videos which were posted ( hundreds), due to a complaint filed by NBC. This as you can imagine caused quite an uproar among the YouTube community.

Utility
The purpose of YouTube and it's functionality has ultimately been created and altered by its users. There are a variety of functions YouTube has been used for. It is known as the most popular vblogging website, a great source of for ducomentary, music videos, educational purposes, and down right funny humor. This mix of user function is perfect and continues to grow as we consider the internet. The fact that anyone can post almost anything (given it apporpiate), really widens the spectrum of "functionality" for YouTube.

Conclusion
Through the internet there have been numerous greatly concieved concepts, many of them never materialize and the ones that do offten fail. YouTube is a great example of an idea materialized and growing at an exponential rate. The principle seems basic, provide a website which allows for free upload and viewing of video. What is important to understand is that the users of YouTube come in the millions, and with them so do all the facets of their lives. Regular users become instant celebrities, personal celebrations become world reknown, local news becomes international, a local band goes platinum. The functionality and overall utility of YouTube and the willingness of users to contribute, view, and maintain it has what made it such a success. YouTube has taken on a role as a medium to broadcast any expression, belief, opinion, or feeling we are capable of. It has in some respect become a completely uncensored form of broadcasting, much like the radio before its regulation.