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from the which-linked-video-will-get-more-clicks? dept.
YouTube turns 15 today. Watch the first video it posted:
The clip is just 18 seconds long, but 15 years ago, it kicked off an online video revolution. Thursday marks the 15th anniversary of the first-ever YouTube video, which shows company co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.
[Video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw]
[...] "All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants, and the cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks," Karim says. "And that's, that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say."
[...] Karim founded YouTube along with Steven Chen and Chad Hurley, all of whom were former PayPal employees. He's said in the past that part of the inspiration for the site came when he missed Janet Jackson's famous wardrobe malfunction at the 2004 Super Bowl[*], and couldn't find online video of the goof. Just one year after the 2005 zoo video was made, Karim and his fellow YouTube co-founders sold the platform to Google for $1.65 billion.
Obligatory link to YouTube video of the 2004 Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday April 24 2020, @03:02AM (5 children)
YouTube has finally allowed me to explore a lot of music, shows, old memes, and other memorable things, at my leisure. It's great. Much better than MTV, which we didn't have anyway because we refused to pay for cable TV. So I simply didn't see music videos, Kids in the Hall, Beavis and Butthead, and other such things. Didn't even know they existed, and didn't know what my friends were talking about whenever they referred to them. Now I've seen just enough to know what they're about. No particular desire to slog through every episode, only wanted to see a representative sample.
YouTube isn't perfect, however. Too much DMCA takedown crap. I often visit DailyMotion for things I can't find on YouTube.
I worry that YouTube is subject to corporate control. That's an awful lot of culture that could be taken down and locked away in an instant. Public libraries ought to have copies of the significant stuff. I rather think, though, that if YouTube were to vanish, without explanation or with an explanation that they were being shut down for copyright violations, other sites would step up and fill the void. Or, there'd be a public backlash.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Friday April 24 2020, @04:37AM (3 children)
Even if you discard 99% to 99.99% of YouTube videos using whatever criteria you come up with, you could be left with a petabyte-scale or even exabyte-scale storage problem. The size of YouTube is increasing faster and faster, although the rate could level off as user growth slows down, and if we don't see a flood of 8K/16K content. Note that every video is probably stored in 50+ resolution/codec combos (audio streams can be stored separately). For backup purposes, you could take just the top quality one using the best codec available. Or you coulddownscale downscale.
Even the Internet Archive would be hard-pressed to take on this kind of backup project. What you do see is that devoted fans download videos from one or a handful of their favorite channels, something that can be accomplished with 2-16 terabyte hard drives. But videos will still end up lost or hard to find if they are purged from the Tube.
The good news is that if you take a step back from videos (and even more storage-hungry VR videos), it is much easier to archive text, images, and music/audio. If books are 1 MB on average, you can store a million books on a 1 TB drive. That's a lot of culture. If there are around 150 million books, storing *all* books will never be particularly difficult even if there are a million new books published every year.
Going forward, we will eventually need new storage mediums that are better than HDDs and NAND. Maybe some optical or holographic technology will allow an exabyte of storage in a 3.5" enclosure at a reasonable price. Hopefully, bytes/$ will increase faster than the storage demands for tuber sites, and the only users who will demand nearly infinite data storage are astronomers.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 25 2020, @01:07PM (2 children)
And the nuclear physicists.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 25 2020, @01:16PM (1 child)
They like their FLOPS, but do they need the storage?
Astronomers would like to store real-time information about the 2 trillion galaxies, 200 sextillion stars, absurd number of exoplanets and asteroids, etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 25 2020, @10:36PM
Physicist get vast amounts of data from CERN.
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday April 25 2020, @04:30AM
Don't worry Ima archiving all of the youtube videos with hot babez in them ;)