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It's easy to forget that things change, and change tends to be exponential. What YouTube did was remove the hassle and fiction in posting videos online. It used

It's easy to forget that things change, and change tends to be exponential. What YouTube did was remove the hassle and fiction in posting videos online. It used to take a lot of effort, and many people who didn't know enough didn't realize the complexities involved. The author here calls youtube an ftp site, and in doing so ignores what set youtube apart. Youtube automatically transcoded videos, it played videos in your browser inline with other content, and it was free. All you had to do was make your video small enough to upload and YouTube did the rest. You didn't have to worry about codecs, or hosting, or bandwidth Nichols, or domain registration, or any of that. Previously if you wanted to host a video online you had to optimize the encoding, pay for bandwidth, and worry about compatibility depending on encoding. Then your video would be viewed by a browser plugin, usually as a bare video. Plus there was a catch-22, if your video got too popular it would cost a ton of money to host. Youtube got rid of all that hassle, and in so doing naturally started to acquire content and users. Once the critical mass network effect kicked in then youtube became the default place to view and post any and all video content. From there it should have been obvious to anyone paying sufficient attention that the quality would only go up, the costs of bandwidth and servers would only go down and with a sufficient number of viewers that some monetization strategy or another was likely to be effective. People made similar mistakes about tons of new technologies, the commonality is often assuming that the launch state is the end state, and not square one of a massive acceleration in sophistication, features, etc.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
The other key thing with YouTube was that in the early days it delivered the video fast. There was no waiting or delay while it buffered. That wasn't the case with other video sites of the era.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Very true. Back then there were a ton of options for video. Hosted mpegs, avis, real video, quicktime, divx, etc. Most of the viral videos of the day were short enough to be downloaded in their entirety. Streaming video was usually extremely low quality with frequent interruptions for buffering. Youtube got rid of most of those problems and improved the situation with buffering by a huge margin.
visakanv 12y ago
> The author here calls youtube an ftp site, and in doing so ignores what set youtube apart. Great point. Very often people when people don't understand a business, or dislike it, it seems that they reduce it to its superficial components. Eg "Uber is just private taxis", "Amazon is just an online bookseller", "Twitter is just a microblogging service". There's usually something more to it than meets the eye, if you're willing to look.
- yla92 12y ago
  I remember people said[1] we could do the same as Dropbox by "getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs .." when the drew houston posted on HN. Not that we couldn't, just that not every user is capable to. So, look at where Dropbox is now. [1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
benihana 12y ago
>It used to take a lot of effort, and many people who didn't know enough didn't realize the complexities involved. It's funny how fast we forget this. Compare video game videos today to 10 years ago. Someone would make a video, spend five hours uploading it via ftp to a niche video hosting website, link me to that website from a separate forum for the game, then I'd spend 40 minutes downloading a video I'd watch twice. It's downright primitive to what we have today. And it was only a decade ago.

waterlesscloud 12y ago

The other key thing with YouTube was that in the early days it delivered the video fast. There was no waiting or delay while it buffered. That wasn't the case with other video sites of the era.

InclinedPlane 12y ago
Very true. Back then there were a ton of options for video. Hosted mpegs, avis, real video, quicktime, divx, etc. Most of the viral videos of the day were short enough to be downloaded in their entirety. Streaming video was usually extremely low quality with frequent interruptions for buffering. Youtube got rid of most of those problems and improved the situation with buffering by a huge margin.

visakanv 12y ago

> The author here calls youtube an ftp site, and in doing so ignores what set youtube apart. Great point. Very often people when people don't understand a business, or dislike it, it seems that they reduce it to its superficial components. Eg "Uber is just private taxis", "Amazon is just an online bookseller", "Twitter is just a microblogging service". There's usually something more to it than meets the eye, if you're willing to look.

yla92 12y ago
I remember people said[1] we could do the same as Dropbox by "getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs .." when the drew houston posted on HN. Not that we couldn't, just that not every user is capable to. So, look at where Dropbox is now. [1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

benihana 12y ago

>It used to take a lot of effort, and many people who didn't know enough didn't realize the complexities involved. It's funny how fast we forget this. Compare video game videos today to 10 years ago. Someone would make a video, spend five hours uploading it via ftp to a niche video hosting website, link me to that website from a separate forum for the game, then I'd spend 40 minutes downloading a video I'd watch twice. It's downright primitive to what we have today. And it was only a decade ago.