Flash flood: the (very short) story of YouTube

You may feel as access to online video clips is one of those "inalienable rights" so much discussed. The Internet is awash with 2009 to video content from your favorite episodes of Seinfeld to home videos of cats playing the piano, and everything in between. And you can get the material you are looking for a large number of sources. And I do mean a great deal in the most literal sense, which leads to excess, excess and superabundance. If you want to share a video with the world, you can go to YouTube and MySpace TV, Metacafe and DailyMotion, Vimeo or AOL-the list goes on and on. Video hosting is now a very mature field with a lot of choices of consumers and its own set of conventions and traditions.

But in this cornfield endless options, YouTube is the pod that rises far above the rest. It is the most popular video service today, and the fourth most visited site on the Internet, according to Alexa traffic-tracking service. On weekends, jump past YouTube Yahoo! number three. YouTube is probably the first to think about when you're looking for online video, or when you need to host your own clips. And with a staggering four years of history, you can call YouTube the grandfather of them all. The graybeard. The old pro. Yoda or Methuselah.

That's right: in 2004, there was no YouTube. Most video sharing sites that we use today does not exist either. YouTube came in early 2005, and changed the way they use the Internet in an instant.
The Dark Ages

In 2004, the search for online video content was not as quick and easy as searching your favorite video site and blasting away. You can find clips on sites scattered, shares of FTP, peer-to-peer services like Kazaa, Gnutella, BitTorrent or relatively new, but it was a multistep process that leaves much to be desired.

First, we had to find the files you want to download and then hope that you had the audio and video codecs installed to view correct the damn thing in Windows Media Player, Quicktime or Real Player. That was easier said than done for the average user, because the technical juggling have to make some rare power of geeks. Moreover, site owners often have bandwidth limits on your accounts, and you do not need to download a 100 megabyte video too many times to implement those limits.

I know it sounds medieval and tortuous, and it was a miracle that no one can see digital videos to everyone. But digital video cameras down in price and rising in popularity. Meanwhile, broadband access, came to his own and the ever increasing power of today's chips from Intel and AMD was asking for a video session on your desktop. The time was ripe for change.