Serving 30 Million Videos a Day
YouTube is a treasure trove of video clips uploaded from its 9.1 million users (since February) in just 11 months. BusinessWeek online questions if they’ll be the next NBC or Napster.
That raises the question: What does YouTube want to be when it grows up? Is it the next NBC or the next Napster ? Hurley and Chen think they’re working toward the future of TV. Venture stalwart Sequoia Capital is betting on the prospect, having invested $3.5 million. But skeptics wonder if the startup can balance its surging popularity with the looming legal risks. “I think YouTube is fantastic,” says Joanne Bradford, head of sales at MSN and other Microsoft properties. “But five years from now I don’t know how they make their money. Their problem is all the pirated content.”
As more and more people get broadband, and computers and video equipment become cheaper, I think we’ll be seeing an enormous amount of video being placed online for public consumption. It reminds me of the ideas of gargoyles that Neil Stephenson wrote about in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. The basic premise being gargoyles are people that record everything around them, Steve Mann-style, in hopes that it will become useful in the future.
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[...] Cheap technology makes it possible for a larger percentage of the world to become producers and not just consumers. For Franziska’s latest physical computing pieces she would buy keyboards for around $10 take them apart and reuse them for her pieces. Just a few years ago this would have been at least three times as expensive to do. Cheap technology is also powering 2.6GB email g-mail accounts and making it possible to host terabytes of video. To quote science-fiction writer William Gibson, “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” [...]
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