Why YouTube works
YouTube is incredibly popular. Add in other services like Google Video, and you have a genuine phenomenon. People are marching in droves to the web to watch video. Why is online video taking off now? Part of the answer must be because most people have broadband now. I doubt that is the main cause, though.
YouTube has made three main innovations:
- Making it incredibly easy for users to contribute videos
- Making a central location to find video clips, with lots of good ways to find them (browsing, searching)
- Giving the Internet a way to link to videos, and giving television clips a way to exist on the Internet.
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Keep in mind that YouTube still does not “work as part of the Web� for a blind or a deaf person, since captioning and description are pretty much never present. (On YouTube it becomes trivially easy to post separate open-captioned and/or -described versions, with no messing around with closed-captioning data formats that really don’t work well online, either.)
September 7th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Some of the big corporations are still retarded about this. Fox and Viacom keep taking down clips and annoying prospective customers, instead of cheering over the free advertising. They’re dinosaurs.
November 20th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
[...] a few years of Youtube showing the world how to do video on the web, lots of traditional broadcasters and studios have started putting their content online. Part of [...]
March 31st, 2008 at 4:15 am