Broadcast Yourself! (youtube.com)

Member Name: marandina

Product:	youtube.com
Date:	06/10/06 (2822 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fascinating clips to view, social networking available

Disadvantages: Occasional abuse

***Introduction***
There are some web sites that seem intent on world domination but then that is the beauty of the Internet. As interest grows in a site, increase in use can become exponential and sites like MySpace, Bebo and YouTube fit into that category. YouTube is, in essence, a free video-sharing site, which lets users upload, view, and share video clips. Founded in February 2005, the service utilises Adobe Flash technology to display video. The vast bulk of site content includes movie and TV clips and music videos but it’s best known for its amateur content such as videoblogging.

YouTube is one of the fastest-growing websites on the World Wide Web and is ranked as the 10th most popular website on Alexa, far outpacing even MySpace's growth. According to a July 16, 2006 announcement, 100 million clips are viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded per 24 hours. The site has almost 20 million visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings and curiously the 12-17 year old age group is the most dominant reflecting the easy adoption of the Internet by the younger generation these days. Only recently, Universal Music threatened to sue the site owners for reproducing its copyrighted images including music videos. Universal head – Doug Morris – is reportedly unhappy at the company’s property being shown free of charge.

***Signing up***
Joining is free and a brief application form including basic information like name, address, date of birth etc generates a confirmation e-mail. At this point you have to access the “upload” tab and re-send the confirmation e-mail which includes a link that finally confirms your registration. Quite why you have to get two seperate e-mail confirmations before you are finally registered is anyone's guess but at least the site is trying to be secure, I suppose!

***Features***
The home page is split into home > videos > channels > groups > categories > upload and a reasonably uncluttered main portal is on a predominantly white background making the text and images stand out and easily readable. Most visitors will either be browsing clips or uploading their own material. With plenty of disclaimers about making sure that any uploaded material is not infringing any existing owner’s copyright then actually using the upload facility is pretty straight forward.

Uploading: Uploading a video is a two-step process and will usually take 1-5 minutes per MB on a high-speed connection. The instructions point out that converting video takes a few minutes and the user can add more info or upload more videos while it's processing. Videos are limited to 10 minutes (unless you're a Director) and 100 MB and videos saved with the following settings convert the best: MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format/320x240 resolution/MP3 audio.

The basic details needed to upload include title > description > tags (where tags are keywords used to describe your video so it can be easily found by other users. For example, if you have a Halloween video, you might tag it: surfing Halloween) > video category > language. Having done this then there is the facility to select the file to be uploaded from your hard drive or where ever it is that the video clip is to be uploaded from (mobile phone clips can be directly uploaded from mobile phones, for instance).

Each video is accompanied by the full HTML codes for linking to it and/or embedding it within another page; a small addition to the code for the latter will make the video autoplay when the page is accessed. These simple cut-and-paste options are popular particularly with users of social/networking sites although I have no first hand experience of this myself. Apparently, bad experiences have been cited by members of these kinds of sites where autoplaying embedded YouTube videos has been known to slow down page loading time or even to cause browsers to crash. Videos can be downloaded from YouTube's website and viewed offline with various video player applications; however, this may be a violation of copyright. With the update to Flash Gui file formats, YouTube has had problems with videos loading altogether on the Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers.

***My experiences***
The featured videos on the main page or always worth a look and today’s gallery includes a 2 minute 36 second video called “My Hands are Bananas” amongst others. It’s a German geezer who has made his own techno video complete with music track. It’s clocked up nearly 84,000 views already and shows just how many people can be reached by the sheer simplicity of the concept. I’m not so sure about the credibility of the banana-on-hand wearing star of this particular clip though! It’s interesting to note that amongst the options available, one is to flag the video as inappropriate so that the site owners can do something about anything that’s untoward with uploads. YouTube has suffered from “happy slapping” clips being uploaded in the past to name but one example of how the site can be abused so it is important that the site polices the content broadcast on a regular basis.

I can’t claim to have uploaded any material yet myself before you think of rushing onto the site to see if there’s any dodgy videos of me flying around but I do use the site a lot to access their music library. Using the search facility, I’ve spent many hours looking up old MPEG files for groups like The Damned, The Jam and so on and even had “A Flock of Seagulls” on t’other night for any one that remembers the lead singer’s remarkable “seagull” hair cut!

There are plenty of facilities that I’ve yet to try on YouTube. A welcome box shows how many video clips I’ve watched and whether I’ve subscribed to any of the channels featured whilst it is possible to receive messages, friend invites and have videos sent. I’m more of a solitary browser just now, preferring to simply view clips rather than join in on the social networking side of the site but maybe that will come in time.

***Conclusion***
YouTube is a wonderful concept and has an addictive quality that will keep visitors coming back over and over again. With a review like this, it’s only really possible to scratch the surface of what’s available on site and nothing beats actually visiting the site itself and having a mooch around. I love watching the music videos along with the comedy clips and the occasional home made videoblog uploaded by members. It’s a lot more interesting than either watching TV or surfing the Net in silence and if you aren’t one of the legions of users already then I suspect that you soon will be. Of course, you could make *that* video, upload it and find yourself a mega-star overnight. It does happen these days although pretty infrequently. As for me, I'll stick with the day job *sigh*

Highly Recommended.

Thanks for reading

Mara

Notes: AVI = Audio Video Interleave and is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of the Video for Windows technology. AVI files contain both audio and video data in a standard container that allows simultaneous playback. AVI files support multiple audio and video streams and there is a free downloadable avi player available at www.divx.com/divx/play.

“Happy slapping” is where people set others up with a prank and record the incident on their mobile phone. Commonly, this is often one child striking another child and a group of pre-prepared children capture the clip on their phones and then send share the video amongst others as a kind of macabre psychological trophy.

Summary: Overview of YouTube