My sincere apologies to those who clicked on the link thinking it's a self-help guide to doing what the title says. It is not. But it is about YouTube, yes. Let me take you back to those days when you had to search for hours online for that movie clip or music video you suddenly thought about. By the time you got to it, either your desire to watch the video had vanished, or you found 12 seconds of that video in really bad print. Let me take you farther behind, remember when you had to buy VCDs and DVDs of movies that you would watch only in the first week after you'd bought them, or when someone came over, and soon it just sat in your drawer like a liability and a shameful reminder of how careless you had been?
Not farther enough, how about the time you had to record on your VCR (Millennial kids: "What?") an episode of your favourite show or a movie on TV you wanted to watch but did not have time to? Pretty often you had to write over an old tape, which would mean watching the video in parts that made no sense at all. Or should I remind you of a time when the whole colony had one TV, and everyone would assemble in that blessed person's house every Sunday morning to watch their favourite show?
What's the point of all this flashback, you ask? Ask yourself this, then and now, how simple has it become to watch videos? Get a good internet plan, be good at typing what you want to see, and voila! You have every video at your beck and call! Who made that possible? Many people did, with a special mention to Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, and their gift to a world that was struggling with online video streaming - YouTube.
Hurley, Chen, and Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube in early 2005, after experiencing difficulty sharing videos from a dinner party at Chen's San Francisco apartment. The original idea for YouTube was a video version of an onlinne dating service, and had been influenced by Hot or Not. But like most successful companies we know today, they did "pivot".
YouTube began as a venture-funded technology start-up, from an $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital in 2005-06. Its early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in California. The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed subsequently.
Not farther enough, how about the time you had to record on your VCR (Millennial kids: "What?") an episode of your favourite show or a movie on TV you wanted to watch but did not have time to? Pretty often you had to write over an old tape, which would mean watching the video in parts that made no sense at all. Or should I remind you of a time when the whole colony had one TV, and everyone would assemble in that blessed person's house every Sunday morning to watch their favourite show?
What's the point of all this flashback, you ask? Ask yourself this, then and now, how simple has it become to watch videos? Get a good internet plan, be good at typing what you want to see, and voila! You have every video at your beck and call! Who made that possible? Many people did, with a special mention to Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, and their gift to a world that was struggling with online video streaming - YouTube.
Hurley, Chen, and Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube in early 2005, after experiencing difficulty sharing videos from a dinner party at Chen's San Francisco apartment. The original idea for YouTube was a video version of an onlinne dating service, and had been influenced by Hot or Not. But like most successful companies we know today, they did "pivot".
YouTube began as a venture-funded technology start-up, from an $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital in 2005-06. Its early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in California. The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed subsequently.
From the first YouTube video 'Me at the zoo', uploaded on April 23, 2005, the site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 they announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.
YouTube says that 300 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that around 60% of the views on a post come from outside the creator's home country. The website has a billion users, and the number of hours people are watching on YouTube each month is up 50% year over year.
In October-November 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, shortly after YouTube entered into a marketing and advertising partnership with NBC in June. In November 2008, it reached an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate and CBS, allowing the companies to post full-length films and television episodes on the site, accompanied by advertisements in a section for US viewers called "Shows", and the rest, as we know it, is history.
From "Shows" to an online film rentals service in January 2009, to free streaming of 60 cricket matches of the Indian Premier League, YouTube became the first worldwide free online broadcaster of a major sporting event.
From providing free content to offering some content providers the ability to charge $0.99 per month or more for certain channels, in May 2013, YouTube went from a mere video sharing website to a vast marketing platform - a brand to watch out for. Be it movie trailers, television episodes or music videos, the producers of the above uploaded these videos themselves in high quality before they got uploaded by someone else, thus curbing video piracy hugely. This has also been true in India, as YouTube is increasingly becoming a platform to showcase your talent, be it Justin Bieber of Canada or Shraddha Sharma of India, or satirical comedy like TVF, AIB, Being Indian and many others.
Red Bull's Statos campaign was one of the most successful YouTube campaigns to date. The live stream was watched by eight million people, while an additional 32 million watched the video on YouTube. Dollar Shave Club created a hilarious video that went viral and has almost 9.5 million views. Getty Images created an amazing video from 873 images to show how vast its collection is. It has over 2.5 million views to date. GoPro is one of the most popular brands on Facebook, creating amazing videos using its cameras. Here it shows how it got there through the medium of video. ReelSEO shows you how you can drive sales through YouTube and how you can increase your conversion rates.
The 'You can skip this ad in...' ticker before certain videos has been cleverly made use of by many marketers today, in fact, some advertisements are made in a way that the first 5 seconds are incredibly attractive, so that the viewer does not skip the ad. Who would have thought that a song or movie trailer's popularity would be judged by its YouTube views?
The future of YouTube is omnipresence. It will be available as widely as TV is today, possibly even more. If it makes itself simple enough to adapt to as many video devices as possible, it will be an every day affair even for a layman with a colour smartphone with an internet connection. It is important for YouTube to be everywhere. If YouTube wants to become as omnipresent on TV as it is on PCs, it should be available on nearly every platform, from Apple TV to the UK’s Freesat satellite service. The future of YouTube’s interface is to be simple enough to work on all sorts of devices, yet rich enough that people can find the videos they care about among vast quantities of available channels.
Today, PCs, phones, tablets, game consoles and streaming-video boxes can play YouTube videos via apps or web-based interfaces. In future, YouTube itself could involve more gadgets, going wherever people want to watch video. Who would have thought that we would watch a three-hour movie on a 5-inch screen, but that happens now. “If something has a screen, and it makes sense to show a YouTube video on it, let’s make it happen.” For that matter, we should be able to play a YouTube video on a microwave oven’s screen as the timer goes off. That is the future of YouTube.
And no, I haven't titled this post only to lure some of you into reading it. Ever since YouTube launched its app and we got WiFi in the house, the TV has become the least used gadget in the house. My mother could not be any prouder of her son, who, after working all day, prefers being with his family instead of surfing TV channels only to check out the latest advertisements. Little does she know that the Nescafe cartoonist advertisement has already found its way into the Offline (Or now, 'Saved Videos') section on my phone! And for that, YouTube, I thank you!
YouTube says that 300 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that around 60% of the views on a post come from outside the creator's home country. The website has a billion users, and the number of hours people are watching on YouTube each month is up 50% year over year.
In October-November 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, shortly after YouTube entered into a marketing and advertising partnership with NBC in June. In November 2008, it reached an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate and CBS, allowing the companies to post full-length films and television episodes on the site, accompanied by advertisements in a section for US viewers called "Shows", and the rest, as we know it, is history.
From "Shows" to an online film rentals service in January 2009, to free streaming of 60 cricket matches of the Indian Premier League, YouTube became the first worldwide free online broadcaster of a major sporting event.
From providing free content to offering some content providers the ability to charge $0.99 per month or more for certain channels, in May 2013, YouTube went from a mere video sharing website to a vast marketing platform - a brand to watch out for. Be it movie trailers, television episodes or music videos, the producers of the above uploaded these videos themselves in high quality before they got uploaded by someone else, thus curbing video piracy hugely. This has also been true in India, as YouTube is increasingly becoming a platform to showcase your talent, be it Justin Bieber of Canada or Shraddha Sharma of India, or satirical comedy like TVF, AIB, Being Indian and many others.
Red Bull's Statos campaign was one of the most successful YouTube campaigns to date. The live stream was watched by eight million people, while an additional 32 million watched the video on YouTube. Dollar Shave Club created a hilarious video that went viral and has almost 9.5 million views. Getty Images created an amazing video from 873 images to show how vast its collection is. It has over 2.5 million views to date. GoPro is one of the most popular brands on Facebook, creating amazing videos using its cameras. Here it shows how it got there through the medium of video. ReelSEO shows you how you can drive sales through YouTube and how you can increase your conversion rates.
The 'You can skip this ad in...' ticker before certain videos has been cleverly made use of by many marketers today, in fact, some advertisements are made in a way that the first 5 seconds are incredibly attractive, so that the viewer does not skip the ad. Who would have thought that a song or movie trailer's popularity would be judged by its YouTube views?
The future of YouTube is omnipresence. It will be available as widely as TV is today, possibly even more. If it makes itself simple enough to adapt to as many video devices as possible, it will be an every day affair even for a layman with a colour smartphone with an internet connection. It is important for YouTube to be everywhere. If YouTube wants to become as omnipresent on TV as it is on PCs, it should be available on nearly every platform, from Apple TV to the UK’s Freesat satellite service. The future of YouTube’s interface is to be simple enough to work on all sorts of devices, yet rich enough that people can find the videos they care about among vast quantities of available channels.
Today, PCs, phones, tablets, game consoles and streaming-video boxes can play YouTube videos via apps or web-based interfaces. In future, YouTube itself could involve more gadgets, going wherever people want to watch video. Who would have thought that we would watch a three-hour movie on a 5-inch screen, but that happens now. “If something has a screen, and it makes sense to show a YouTube video on it, let’s make it happen.” For that matter, we should be able to play a YouTube video on a microwave oven’s screen as the timer goes off. That is the future of YouTube.
And no, I haven't titled this post only to lure some of you into reading it. Ever since YouTube launched its app and we got WiFi in the house, the TV has become the least used gadget in the house. My mother could not be any prouder of her son, who, after working all day, prefers being with his family instead of surfing TV channels only to check out the latest advertisements. Little does she know that the Nescafe cartoonist advertisement has already found its way into the Offline (Or now, 'Saved Videos') section on my phone! And for that, YouTube, I thank you!
