Five Years of YouTube and Forced Evolution 329
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ScuttleMonkey
from the court-of-public-opinion dept.
from the court-of-public-opinion dept.
NakNak writes to mention that the DailyMaverick has a feature looking back at five years of YouTube, some of the massive changes that have been forced through as a result of its overwhelming popularity, and what changes might be necessary going forward. "Google, which bought YouTube less than two years after it was founded for what was then considered outrageously expensive $1.65 billion, does not want Microsoft or Apple (or anybody else) to own the dominant video format. So it has become the biggest early tester of HTML5. Your browser doesn't support HTML5? Google launches its own browser, Chrome. Need to use Internet Explorer at work because that's all your IT department supports? Google launches a Chrome framework that effectively subverts IE and makes it HTML5-compatible. The final blow will be the day that YouTube switches off Flash and starts streaming only to HTML5 browsers. On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage."
and this is how google wins (Score:5, Insightful)
some business school moron could have said "hey, why don't we leverage our power and force a proprietary format on consumers, and they will be our captive audience"
like microsoft
like sony
etc
has any of it worked? no
for all the anxiety about google's increasing power, as long google does something like this: actively undermine and destroy a closed format in favor of an open one, then the consumer wins, google wins, other companies win, progress and innovation wins, and shortsighted greedy assholes who try to manipulate market inefficiencies in their favor lose (i'm looking at you, music and other media companies). in this context, at least, google really is "doing no evil"
life in the old browsers yet (Score:5, Insightful)
On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage
While youtube is nice for idling away some downtime, it's not the internet-dominating force this article makes out. If it disappeared tomorrow, than apart from instantly increasing corporate productivity and allowing children everywhere to get their homework done on time, there wouldn't be so much of a change.
There are also (sit down, this might be a bit of a shock) lots and lots of people who rarely, if ever visit youtube. For them, it's existence or change in the tech. it needs will make no difference at all - if their old browsers fail I'm sure they find other things to do on the internet.
While I'm sure youtube will keep going - for some time at least, and will change more over time there's nothing life changing about it.
User outrage more likely to be at Google (Score:4, Insightful)
On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage
Most users don't know and don't care about the standards wars. What's more likely to happen is:
Re:User outrage more likely to be at Google (Score:5, Insightful)
HTML5 Video: A big No-No (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:and this is how google wins (Score:5, Insightful)
for all the anxiety about google's increasing power, as long google does something like this: actively undermine and destroy a closed format in favor of an open one
You mean like how Google actively undermines H.264?
Yes. I am very impressed that they are actively undermining H.264.
Definitely it can be said that Google actively undermines H.264.
Re:.h26x a stumbling point? (Score:1, Insightful)
And that matters because ...? It's not like the average Joe would know what H.264 is either... or PNG, or CSS, or a ton of other basic web technologies.
Re:Perish (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not an Apple fanboi, but I will say: the problem is not that the iPhone doesn't support Flash, the problem is that Flash, as a proprietary overlay to the open Web, even exists.
I spend most of my time on my desktop using NoScript to actively BLOCK Flash, and grudgingly allow it to run when I have no other alternative to get the information I need. Flash support on a mobile phone without the means to easily block it via a permissions structure is an absolute battery and usability nightmare waiting to happen.
Re:User outrage more likely to be at Google (Score:2, Insightful)
It may actually benefit Google to give users a reason to switch to Chrome.
IE6 rules! (Score:2, Insightful)
Management is going to be VERY happy that youtube will stop working with older web browsers. User productivity is going to skyrocket.
Re:HTML5 Video: A big No-No (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:life in the old browsers yet (Score:3, Insightful)
You're not really making a distinction between people who are surfing the tubes for recreation and people who are working or studying. If you're just kicking around, then youtube and co. are certainly optional stops. But it's also the prime gathering point for stuff like TED talks, "man on the street" video reporting, Sagan mashups, HOWTO videos, out of circulation educational films, and so forth. It's not really that important to have all of this hosted by YouGoogly, but it is nice to have one place to start your searching.
As far as "life changing" is concerned, I think would depend on if you're in the "funny cat" camp or the "last lecture" camp. You may, in fact, be doing it wrong.
Re:HTML5 Video: A big No-No (Score:2, Insightful)
Y2K called and left the following message:
I don't think Flash video/flv will ever be successful. RealMedia is very dominant.
Re:Cart or Horse first? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:life in the old browsers yet (Score:5, Insightful)
"If it disappeared tomorrow, than apart from instantly increasing corporate productivity"
Really? My employer uses YouTube a lot. We make YouTube videos of customer recommendations. Having an engineer gush about all of the time he saves with our product makes a very effective sales tool.
A lot of companies use YouTube for instructional videos for their products. Why bother with complex printed directions when you can watch a real live human do it?
Really you should not dismiss the value of something just because YOU can't figure out how to do something useful with it.
Re:Perish (reasons why flash is not supported) (Score:5, Insightful)
The video sites I will give you (although if they really wanted to be on the iPhone they would just make the original h264 files available) but people bemoaning the lack of flash games on the iPhone are missing an important point - none of the existing flash games would work anyway!
The iPhone doesn't have a keyboard and (even worse) has no mouse. These two facts alone mean that the vast majority of game would not work. Even games that use the mouse purely for pointing would run into problems, since tapping with your finger is much less precise than using a mouse pointer. In addition, on the iPhone you effectively have multiple pointing devices - how would current Flash apps handle that?
For a quick demo of why sites like newsgrounds will never work on the iPhone, resize your browser window to 480*320 (or 320*480 since that is more usual) and visit your favourite gaming site. Now set your mouse pointer to a big white blob instead of an arrow to similar tapping with a large figertip. Remember to stop playing after 45 minutes to simulate the battery drain. See how much fun you have.
Re:Perish (Score:5, Insightful)
Only because youve drunk so much of the koolaid and so used to be roughed up by corporations that you have no idea what its like to have a phone platform that does more
First off, I'll admit that I generally like Apple's products since they different parts are well-integrated (just to get that part out of the way, if that makes you think I'm a fanboy or that I've "drunk the kool-aid" then so be it).
Second, I've used and owned other smartphones that were much more capable than the iPhone on paper but which with real-world usage fell flat because of massive user interface issues, applications that leaked memory and general instability that made any perceived stability issues with the iPhone seem completely insignificant in comparison.
An example of this is the touchscreen on a friend's "high end" Nokia (I think) smartphone which together with the general UI lag makes using the phone painful, precision was so poor it was almost painful.
A second example would be my gf's phone (I can't remember the brand or model, the models are all 32789XS91080++ TouchTurboDeluxe gibberish to me), I experimented a bit with the UI and concluded that from the default "home" screen it took about half a dozen keypresses to get to the browser, once the browser was running I had to open a menu, scroll down to the "I want to visit a website" option and scroll down to the "I want to enter an URL manually" option before I could enter an URL. And that was the fastest path I could find. As a comparison, on an iPhone entering an URL involves tapping Safari, tapping the address bar and typing in the URL. It's hardly revolutionary but at least it's done right.
As for flash, the only times I miss that is when I stumble across some website designed by some incompetent hack who thinks the only way to do menu rollover effects is with flash...
/Mikael
YouTube will get the outrage, not IE (Score:2, Insightful)
On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage.
People won't blame their browser (IE) they will yell at YouTube for needlessly breaking something that was working just fine. Seriously, users don't care AT ALL about the politics behind this. They just want IE6 to keep working. Well, "working" might be a generous description, but you get the point.
Re:Chrome Frame (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are corporate employees watching Youtube at work? Obviously there may be some useful technical talks and the like, but in most companies very few people have a legitimate reason for doing so.
For the same reason they'd browse Facebook and have a twitter app on the side -- people aren't machines. It's true that quite a few companies block facebook/youtube/twitter/myspace, but they're not the majority. Any "sane" company worries about employee output, not how said employees go about producing it.
And any company which locks their employees into using IE probably deserves everything they get.
This includes many government institutions in the western world. They use IE because it's easy to administer across a large network. The major hurdle for any non-IE browser is to get into corporate environments -- people using their computers at home already know (for the most part) that pretty much any browser is better than IE.
Re:Perish (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would anyone send you a link to Vimeo knowing it wont work on your iphone?
You must have a much more tech-savvy circle of friends than I do. Most people I know and communicate with on a regular basis (outside of work, that is) neither know nor care about the underlying technology of various web sites and how they interact with the operating systems of the computers and gadgets that I use. Such conversations invariably look like, "What's active-x? That won't work on your computer? Oh that's too...hey, look! A squirrel!".
What they do know: "Hey, this web site is cool. I think I will send a link to everyone in my e-mail list!"
Re:and this is how google wins (Score:1, Insightful)
has any of it worked? no
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft [yahoo.com]
You have a funny definition of "has not worked" ...
Re:.h26x a stumbling point? (Score:5, Insightful)
H.264 has significantly better video quality
Wrong. Ogg Theora is nearly identical in quality to H.264. Both are a lot better than H.263. Judge for yourself: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html [xiph.org]
will be free until at least 2015, and I'm willing to bet it will continue to be free after that.
If there are no alternatives, I'm sure H.264 will not remain free. Once everyone is hooked, why on Earth wouldn't the owners start charging money for it? Because they're such nice people? LOL. If they have no plans to start charging for it, why don't they make it free forever, starting now? Since they have not done so, obviously they are hoping they can eventually charge money for it.
The war is already over
Propaganda. If it was over, we'd all know that already. The fact you feel you have to make a proclamation suggests you're not sure yourself, or that you have a hidden agenda. You say it's everywhere, and that's why it has already won. It's not nearly as widespread as you seem to think. Many of us do not use Blu-Ray. Much video on the Internet is still H.263.
Re:source? (Score:4, Insightful)
[citation needed]
Re:User outrage more likely to be at Google (Score:3, Insightful)
The end result is that Joe User doesn't get angry at YouTube for "suddenly not working", but eventually gets the message that his browser is broken and needs upgrading.
Re:HTML5 Video: A big No-No (Score:3, Insightful)
Erm...I mean...oh, nevermind.
Re:Thanks to YouTube (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a fun diversion, but you really have to wonder. About civilization.
People are still reading Aristophanes. Fart jokes have always been funny. I'm not worrying too much. (Not about that, anyway.)
Re:Perish (Score:2, Insightful)
perish [...] just like the Iphone
I'm inclined to believe there's a fair amount of people who, when their time comes, would just love to perish as the iPhone is perishing now.
Re:Perish (Score:1, Insightful)
As a counter to that, I'm glad flash exists so that I can use NoScript to block all the annoying adverts and crap. :)
Re:HTML5 Video: A big No-No (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think HTML5 video will ever be successful, flash video/flv is very dominant.
I don't think Flash video will ever be successful, since RealPlayer is very dominant.
Sincerely,
1999.
Re:HTML5 Video: A big No-No (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Open Web alternative to Newgrounds? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bah! I hate having to dick around with stupid flash animated picture galleries etc. Give me a nice html page with ftp links to your content, I may be on a slow gprs link and viewing the content on a separate device.
Too many duhsigners and arsetists.
Re:.h26x a stumbling point? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Sure linking to a comparison on xiph.org, that'll be unbiased. Please, can we have a comparison that isn't devoid of all neutrality?
2) Lots of companies in the MPEG LA have an interest in making H.264 videos free to play, like say all those selling H.264 cameras and selling editing software and encoders and whatnot. Microsoft and Apple are already licensing it for Windows and OS X, I'm sure they have licenses that are permanent to make it a base technology like that. In other words, this is getting very close to patent FUD.
3) Look around, everywhere MPEG2 and H.263 is considered legacy and slowly being replaced with H.264. Theora is like Vorbis, the only place I ever hear about it is on slashdot. To your "Propaganda. If it was over, we'd all know that already." is that some people here are like the Iraqi information ministry. There is no threat from H.264, the glorious Theora is victorious on all fronts.
Re:Here's a secret about the Internet.. Shh (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends on what you mean by "available". If you just want to dump your video files on a web site, then yes, anybody can make their videos available — if "available" doesn't include people actually seeing it. And a video dumped on an ordinary web site, won't be — even if people can find it, they mostly won't have the patience to download or buffer it.
Successful online videos are the ones that go viral. For that to happen, there has to be some kind of search and web 2.0 functionality to help people find it. There also (and this is the hard part) has to be heavy-duty network infrastructure that allows the video to start streaming seconds after the user clicks on it,. That's a much more useful version of "available".
Thought-provoking line from the article (Score:2, Insightful)
However, there was a more fundamental problem, in the minds of some internet service providers and powerful telecommunications companies. YouTube pays for the transmission of half that awesome amount of data it serves (in theory only, in practice it's less). The other half is paid by those who receive it, by way of the telephone company used to get internet access. The users may consider that fair, but the telephone companies saw the equivalent of newspapers being delivered using their vans while they see none of the advertising revenue. YouTube, and Google and Facebook and other big traffic destinations, they argued, should pay to reach those customers.
Now, think about this for a moment. If I am renting a van from you, paying what you asked for mileage, filling up the tank when I brought it back, etc... why should I give you more money for using it to deliver newspapers, than if I used it to pick up a couch and bring it back to my place?
Seriously, where the hell did they think up this analogy?
Re:.h26x a stumbling point? (Score:2, Insightful)
H.264 is significantly better then Theora. The comparison on xiph only shows similar quality because Youtube uses suboptimal settings on x264 and the Theora guy cranked the settings as high he could get them.
You may notice he sacrificed things like seeking granularity to increase Theora's effectiveness, if he had used similar settings then it wouldn't be as close.
Re:Arrogance... (Score:3, Insightful)
If HTML5 is built into every browser,
Pretty damn big "if", there.
Microsoft has expressed no interest in supporting HTML5 at all in Internet Explorer. It's been made very clear that Firefox will not support patent-and-royalty encumbered H.264. Opera joins Mozilla in its hostility to H.264. "It plays on Safari and Chrome" is not a compelling sales pitch on either side of the creator-viewer divide.
On the other hand, Flash? The plugin is already ubiquitous; Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris all have Flash 10, and it works with both NPAPI and ActiveX browsers. It's been used for years, and there's masses of content already developed for it, so the need for it isn't going away any time soon.
Re:.h26x a stumbling point? (Score:3, Insightful)
if you actually WATCH the videos it's not hard to see that the theora encode looks FAR worse than the h.264 on practically every frame
Indeed. And consider... this is the Xiph web site.. these are the Ogg Theora development people. So what you're seeing there is the best argument they could construct, and it still fails.
Theora is at an inherent disadvantage, and always will be. It was, after all, based on On2's VP3, which they tossed out there for free once VP4 was shipping. They're on VP8 now, and recently bought by Google. Anyway, they are inherently limited by the improvements they can add, because they're likely to trip on any number of video encoding patents that have been filed in the 10 years since VP3 was released. This, in fact, is one big concern from the big companies involved in HTML5... if you're an MPEG-LA licensee, you're covered should any new patents emerge on H.264, as unlikely as that is. But Theora hasn't been all that tested.
I have absolutely nothing against some open source CODECs being available, I think that's great, and would put pressure on the MPEG-LA to keep H.264 free. But Theora is the wrong answer. Right answers? Well, it needs more work, but the BBC's Dirac [wikipedia.org] CODEC is more competitive, if just as much of a problem on handheld gear. Google could release VP8 to the FOSS community, which is said to be noticeably more efficient than H.264 at lower bitrates. Both still could have patent entanglement issues, however.