This is the script of my national radio report last Monday regarding
YouTube, which just turned 20 years old. As usual, there may have been
minor wording variations from this script as I presented my report
live on air.
- - -
So yeah, Google's YouTube just turned 20 years old a few days ago --
hard to believe -- and I could literally spend hours talking about the
various facets of YouTube, but I'll say at the outset right now that I
consider YouTube to be one of the wonders of the world. It's by far my
favorite streaming service and if I had to pick one streaming service
to exist it would be YouTube.
Having said that, YouTube is a quintessential example of having the
good, the bad, and the ugly aspects, and unfortunately along with the
continuing quality decline in Google services generally there are
reasons to be concerned about YouTube in these respects as well.
One of the key things to remember about YouTube is that no matter how
big you think it is along any number of metrics, it's probably in
reality much bigger. Whether you're talking about the total number of
videos, the total runtime of all those videos, the quantity of videos
being uploaded to YouTube at any given moment, or the number of
simultaneous streams being viewed by users in terms of total number of
watch hours, the numbers are all staggering.
As you may know Google actually bought YouTube from some guys who
originated it. Before that, Google actually had its own Google video
service that was rather quickly deprecated once Google got hold of
YouTube. And the very first YouTube video is still online, it's
extremely short and consists of one of the original YouTube founders
looking at an elephant at the zoo.
And for many years that kind of personal content was what YouTube was
really all about. Now of course it's a completely different world and
YouTube writ large is one of the major players in what we could
broadly call broadcasting. This includes their own YouTube TV
streaming service which rivals traditional cable TV offerings in
scope, though unfortunately at a price that is now very similar to the
kinds of high prices that drove many people away from traditional
cable TV packages in the first place.
If you're mainly interested in watching YouTube videos and creator
live streams rather than traditional cable TV channels, YouTube
Premium is more reasonably priced -- though it's also been creeping up
considerably. Premium eliminates the increasingly annoying and
frequent YouTube inserted ads that you'll otherwise see on there. And
given that YouTube now has a rather remarkable official catalog of
feature films including many classics, that makes Premium competitive
with various other streaming services especially given the vast range
of content available on YouTube.
And this gets us deeper into the topic of YouTube content. And I'll
say right up front that I'm mainly interested in technology content
and all sorts of older content, like old industrial and training
films, and of course the classic movies and such. And there's a
tremendous amount of such content on YouTube across an enormous range
of topics. I have virtually no interest in what would typically be
called "trending topics" so I'm clearly not in YouTube's preferred
viewer demographic.
Unfortunately, there is also a seemingly bottomless pit of absolutely
terrible, and many cases deeply disgusting and sometimes truly
horrific content on YouTube. Some of it gets removed when reported,
some of it YouTube insists doesn't violate their rules and it stays
online.
There's also, as you might have noticed, a dismal plague of awful
AI-generated videos on YouTube, that mostly seem to exist only to
collect random views, and that make it increasingly difficult to find
useful content buried under so much AI-created garbage. And Google has
now moved to make creating AI videos on YouTube even easier, so yeah,
this is the harbinger of decline that I mentioned at the top.
This is all just scratching the surface of 20 years of YouTube. Again,
very much the good, the bad, and the ugly, and seemingly on the way to
getting uglier. How quickly and how far it sinks in that direction, we
shall all learn in the fullness of time.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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