Do-it-yourself 'TV' thrives on YouTube
on StarNet
by Michelle Quinn, June 11, 2006
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Allen Ng's YouTube habit is eating into his TV habit.
Every chance he gets, the 14-year-old from Fremont checks the YouTube.com Web site to watch short videos of badminton clips, excerpts of Chinese movies and funny, amateur productions made and posted by strangers from around the world. At school, the buzz among Ng's friends isn't about TV but about quirky YouTube videos — like the Norwegian man recently performing as a human sound-effects machine.
"I go to YouTube when I get bored," Allen said.
YouTube and other video-sharing Web sites signal a shift in the way entertainment will be made and consumed in the future. They're creating a new form of television that's at once personal, grass-roots and unfettered.
With the emergence of technology for easily sharing video over the Internet, viewers are gaining the autonomy to choose what, when and where they watch — be it on an iPod or a laptop or desktop computer. And the masses are getting an opportunity to create and experiment with video while bypassing the central filter of a TV network.
No company epitomizes these rapid changes more than YouTube. In the past six months, YouTube, a 27-employee company housed above a pizzeria in San Mateo, Calif., has become a new global stage. Visitors to the site view more than 50 million videos a day, mostly made by amateurs. Its audience has mushroomed to 12.5 million a month, making it the chief place people go online to watch video. It has become one of the 50 most visited Web sites overall.
Many YouTube videos are dreck — traffic mishaps, lonely teenagers, babies crawling, skateboard tricks. Some are blurry or shaky. Virtually all are short clips, lasting one to two minutes. Some are copyrighted, lifted right off the TV. But there also is a lot of original talent on display.
"What really motivates people is being seen and getting a response," said Chad Hurley, 29, a YouTube co-founder and chief executive who shakes his blond bangs out of his face when he talks.
Confident but vague
Although his company has come out of nowhere fast, Hurley is surprisingly confident about YouTube's prospects. He is quintessential Silicon Valley, earnest about how technology can change the world but vague (perhaps purposely so) about how it will make money. "We are just trying to help people find an easy way to share their experiences," he said.
But other companies, such as technology giants Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, are offering online video too. And smaller players, such as Revver, Grouper and iFilm, are competing with YouTube for interesting content. MySpace, the social networking Web site popular among teens, has ramped up its online video-sharing features, which may eat into YouTube's market.
Indeed, Web sites such as YouTube, whose motto is "Broadcast Yourself," have a long way to go before killing off the boob tube. In a recent survey for the Online Publishers Association, 24 percent of Internet users said they watched online video at least once a week, and only 5 percent watched it daily. The average person watches four hours and 52 minutes of TV a day, according to Nielsen Media Research. On average, each YouTube visitor spends nearly 16 minutes on the site, according to Hitwise, an online measurement firm in New York.
For now, YouTube is a pastime mostly for the young. Thirty-one percent of its visitors are ages 18 to 24, according to Hitwise. And that is probably the age range of most of YouTube's budding video makers.
Off-the-cuff horror film
During a recent night at 3 a.m., Ryan Lee and three friends made a short horror film called "Pencils" in their dormitory at San Jose State University. In "Pencils," a dorm is haunted by a girl, a ghost who has been contacted through pencils.
After making the 2-minute, 53-second film and editing it on his computer with a program called Windows Media Maker, Lee dragged it onto YouTube. So far, 264 people have viewed "Pencils."
A criminology major, the 18-year-old Lee says he plans to make more films. "We're night creatures with sometimes nothing to do," he said.
"Pencils" isn't going to steal viewers from hit TV shows anytime soon. But Hollywood is avidly watching — and chasing — this new audience that wants to watch short, raw video without the filter of a big media organization.
"It's the mass talking to the mass," said Jesse Drew, associate director of techno-cultural studies at the University of California-Davis. "Now there's no central spigot that everything comes out of."
Online video is nothing new. But over the past year, the spread of fast Internet connections, easy-to-use editing software and cheap camcorders and camera phones has turned it into a mass phenomenon. Videos of current events, such as the July 2005 terrorist blasts in London and Hurricane Ka-trina, were e-mailed around the world instantly, sometimes making it onto network news.
"People don't want to be the next Spielberg, but they want to express themselves," said J.D. Lasica, executive director of Ourmedia, a not-for-profit Web site for videos and other content.
Co-founders met at PayPal
YouTube's beginnings are classic Silicon Valley. Co-founders Hurley, who studied art and graphic design in college, and Steve Chen, an engineer, met in 1999 while working at PayPal, an online payment service now owned by eBay. They attended a party in January 2005 where someone made a video. But they couldn't find an easy way to share the video online.
They began to develop technology that makes it easy to post and watch videos online, no matter what camera or computer is used. And without downloading software.
The site was officially launched in December, with financial backing from Sequoia Capital, the venture-capital firm that also backed Google.
Chen, 27, who is YouTube's chief technology officer, still seems shocked by how the Web site has evolved from the days when he put up videos of his cats to give people an idea of what they can do with YouTube.
"It's almost like a challenge now among users to produce more entertaining content," Chen said.
The co-founders say they don't want to become the new TV or supplant the Hollywood machinery.
They plan to make money from advertising on the site, as well as through cross-promotional arrangements with movie studios, record companies and others.
by Michelle Quinn, June 11, 2006
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Allen Ng's YouTube habit is eating into his TV habit.
Every chance he gets, the 14-year-old from Fremont checks the YouTube.com Web site to watch short videos of badminton clips, excerpts of Chinese movies and funny, amateur productions made and posted by strangers from around the world. At school, the buzz among Ng's friends isn't about TV but about quirky YouTube videos — like the Norwegian man recently performing as a human sound-effects machine.
"I go to YouTube when I get bored," Allen said.
YouTube and other video-sharing Web sites signal a shift in the way entertainment will be made and consumed in the future. They're creating a new form of television that's at once personal, grass-roots and unfettered.
With the emergence of technology for easily sharing video over the Internet, viewers are gaining the autonomy to choose what, when and where they watch — be it on an iPod or a laptop or desktop computer. And the masses are getting an opportunity to create and experiment with video while bypassing the central filter of a TV network.
No company epitomizes these rapid changes more than YouTube. In the past six months, YouTube, a 27-employee company housed above a pizzeria in San Mateo, Calif., has become a new global stage. Visitors to the site view more than 50 million videos a day, mostly made by amateurs. Its audience has mushroomed to 12.5 million a month, making it the chief place people go online to watch video. It has become one of the 50 most visited Web sites overall.
Many YouTube videos are dreck — traffic mishaps, lonely teenagers, babies crawling, skateboard tricks. Some are blurry or shaky. Virtually all are short clips, lasting one to two minutes. Some are copyrighted, lifted right off the TV. But there also is a lot of original talent on display.
"What really motivates people is being seen and getting a response," said Chad Hurley, 29, a YouTube co-founder and chief executive who shakes his blond bangs out of his face when he talks.
Confident but vague
Although his company has come out of nowhere fast, Hurley is surprisingly confident about YouTube's prospects. He is quintessential Silicon Valley, earnest about how technology can change the world but vague (perhaps purposely so) about how it will make money. "We are just trying to help people find an easy way to share their experiences," he said.
But other companies, such as technology giants Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, are offering online video too. And smaller players, such as Revver, Grouper and iFilm, are competing with YouTube for interesting content. MySpace, the social networking Web site popular among teens, has ramped up its online video-sharing features, which may eat into YouTube's market.
Indeed, Web sites such as YouTube, whose motto is "Broadcast Yourself," have a long way to go before killing off the boob tube. In a recent survey for the Online Publishers Association, 24 percent of Internet users said they watched online video at least once a week, and only 5 percent watched it daily. The average person watches four hours and 52 minutes of TV a day, according to Nielsen Media Research. On average, each YouTube visitor spends nearly 16 minutes on the site, according to Hitwise, an online measurement firm in New York.
For now, YouTube is a pastime mostly for the young. Thirty-one percent of its visitors are ages 18 to 24, according to Hitwise. And that is probably the age range of most of YouTube's budding video makers.
Off-the-cuff horror film
During a recent night at 3 a.m., Ryan Lee and three friends made a short horror film called "Pencils" in their dormitory at San Jose State University. In "Pencils," a dorm is haunted by a girl, a ghost who has been contacted through pencils.
After making the 2-minute, 53-second film and editing it on his computer with a program called Windows Media Maker, Lee dragged it onto YouTube. So far, 264 people have viewed "Pencils."
A criminology major, the 18-year-old Lee says he plans to make more films. "We're night creatures with sometimes nothing to do," he said.
"Pencils" isn't going to steal viewers from hit TV shows anytime soon. But Hollywood is avidly watching — and chasing — this new audience that wants to watch short, raw video without the filter of a big media organization.
"It's the mass talking to the mass," said Jesse Drew, associate director of techno-cultural studies at the University of California-Davis. "Now there's no central spigot that everything comes out of."
Online video is nothing new. But over the past year, the spread of fast Internet connections, easy-to-use editing software and cheap camcorders and camera phones has turned it into a mass phenomenon. Videos of current events, such as the July 2005 terrorist blasts in London and Hurricane Ka-trina, were e-mailed around the world instantly, sometimes making it onto network news.
"People don't want to be the next Spielberg, but they want to express themselves," said J.D. Lasica, executive director of Ourmedia, a not-for-profit Web site for videos and other content.
Co-founders met at PayPal
YouTube's beginnings are classic Silicon Valley. Co-founders Hurley, who studied art and graphic design in college, and Steve Chen, an engineer, met in 1999 while working at PayPal, an online payment service now owned by eBay. They attended a party in January 2005 where someone made a video. But they couldn't find an easy way to share the video online.
They began to develop technology that makes it easy to post and watch videos online, no matter what camera or computer is used. And without downloading software.
The site was officially launched in December, with financial backing from Sequoia Capital, the venture-capital firm that also backed Google.
Chen, 27, who is YouTube's chief technology officer, still seems shocked by how the Web site has evolved from the days when he put up videos of his cats to give people an idea of what they can do with YouTube.
"It's almost like a challenge now among users to produce more entertaining content," Chen said.
The co-founders say they don't want to become the new TV or supplant the Hollywood machinery.
They plan to make money from advertising on the site, as well as through cross-promotional arrangements with movie studios, record companies and others.
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