YouTube by Jesse Torok

In 1968 the Pop-artist Andy Warhol stated "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes".  The Internet, web-cams and a little web-site called YouTube has made this prediction come true.

YouTube Rising
Sharing video files over the Internet has been common since the advent of high speed Internet connections, but nobody had gotten it quite right until YouTube.com came along.  YouTube has had a meteoric rise on the Internet.   The site launched in just November of 2005.  The site has grown even faster then the MySpace social networking site.  100 million clips are viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded per day. The site has almost 20 million visitors each month.

Once you are on YouTube it is easy to see why it is so popular.  Watching videos on viral video web sites prior to YouTube was often very frustrating. Other sites required your web browser to have the correct browser Plug-in and often launched an external video player application.  YouTube uses Adobe Flash technology that plays the video clip right inside your browser window.  Uploading your own clips and web-cam videos is just as easy.  Videos can be rated and comments left, creating a sense of community.  One can even reply to a video with their own video response.

There is a wealth of original content.  Anything from independent movies and sketches, talking head web-cam video blogs and unfiltered, unedited news reports from all over the world.  Browsing the contents can lead to anything from the hilarious to something controversial, disgusting or moving.

Old Media
Traditional Media outlets have scrambled to deal with the Internet and viral video phenomenon.  People are watching less TV because of spending more time browsing sites like YouTube.  There are several shows on network and cable TV that even feature videos downloaded directly from the Internet.   Traditional television networks first reacted much like the Recording Industry did to MP3's, forcing clips or episodes of their shows to be removed from these sites.  They quickly reconsidered and now both NBC and CBS have deals with YouTube allowing content from their channels to be posted as a means of promotion.  YouTube policy does not allow copyrighted material to be posted, still a large amount of it is uploaded.  Unless the copyright holder reports these videos, YouTube only discovers them by users reporting it.

GooTube and the Future
In October 2006, Google, Inc., announced that it had reached a deal to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google's stock.  YouTube has also announced that because of recent agreements with NBC and CBS, they will now be required to use anti-piracy software.  YouTube would have to substitute an approved version of copyrighted clips or take the material down.  While this is good news for copyright holders, it may hurt YouTubes hit ratings, if users can find this banned material on another site they are likely to abandon YouTube. 

Go sign on now, point your web browser at Youtube.com and check it out.