Science Library Pad

the Internet is a series of bubbles: Google pays $1.6billion for YouTube

Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock

Combination Will Create New Opportunities for Users and Content Owners Everywhere

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., October 9, 2006 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction.  Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.

If this wasn't October, and Google wasn't a public company, I'd suspect this was all an elaborate practical joke.

In case you're wondering...

About YouTube

Founded in February 2005, YouTube is a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience.

That's got to be the fastest billion made in the history of ever.  From zero to a billion in 20 months.
I'd like to hear that sales pitch: "YouTube: it produces nothing.  It hosts videos other people create, and illegal video copies.  Yours for only a billion dollars."  Oh, and by the way, YouTube has no business model.

via Slashdot Google Buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion /.

early adopters, hype, and history (with pretty pictures)

I am an early adopter, which can make for some less than enthusiastic reactions from me once everyone catches up.  The main point of this posting is just to say that it seems to me we forget our history so quickly - it's like the new overwrites the old, with no memory of the past.  I think a lot of this could be addressed by people adding just a single history slide to their presentations, just to say "yes, Skype and Flickr are fun, but by the way, there's 15+ years of Internet history behind the latest buzz".

In theory I should be able to go back to my digital photo #0001, but in practice the earliest I could find was #0019, from June 14, 2000.

I was trying to figure out some of the Flickr excitement, and then a speaker's comment twigged me, he said something along the lines of "the people at Flickr came up with an amazing idea... share digital photos".  Then I realized: to late adopters, whatever is mainstream looks innovative.  In fact they may think that whoever is the latest service provider invented providing that service.

My first online photo gallery is in Ofoto.  July 10, 2000.
Yes, it's still there, stored by the fine folks at Kodak.
The earliest public photo gallery I have up, also in Ofoto, is Halifax Public Gardens and Area, August 2001.

I've also had a digital video (DV) camcorder since 1999, so you will find me less than amazed with this year's wave of Internet video excitement.

All of this sort of stuff on the net - photos, audio, video - it was all out there already 5-10 years ago.  I realize that a lot of it is only hitting major public adoption now, but the main point is to keep Internet history in mind.  It always seems to me that in the excitement of Web 2.0 or whatever the latest net.bubble is, we forget that there may be lots of history to something that appears "new". 

If you want some of the history of video and audio conferencing, you could start with CU-SeeMe, which I used in the 1990s.

CU-SeeMe is an internet video-conferencing client written by students at Cornell University. It was first developed for the Macintosh in 1992 and later for the Windows platform in 1994. Originally it was video-only with audio added in 1994 for the Macintosh and 1995 for Windows. CU-SeeMe's audio came from Maven, an audio only client developed at the University of Illinois.

So the exciting new world of Internet video is now at least 14 years old.  The Mac, with a microphone and a QuickCam, was actually a big part of that.

Here's a movie I did with the QuickCam and synchronized CD audio.  According to my file system, it's from July 26, 1998:  QuickCam.mov (requires QuickTime)

The earliest QuickCam digital photo I could err... quickly find on my system is from April 2, 1996.
(It's me sweeping one of those glow-in-the-dark sticks in front of my face.)

Maybe someone should do a vlog about Internet video history.

Google Video Store is (sort of) here

Google Video Store has mostly sort of gone live.  It shows up as a line of shows for purchase on the main Google Video home page.

You can buy e.g. Star Trek Voyager - Tattoo for US$1.99 .
You need to set up a Google Account, if you don't already have one.
An AdSense account, for reasons unclear to me, is not a Google Account.
If you click to set one up, it will prompt you for credit card.
It wants your phone number "Used to verify your credit card".

Problem #1: I am giving out my phone number to companies when hell freezes over.

You know what happens when you give out your phone number?  Hello telemarketers.

Problem #2: Only AFTER you enter in your address info in the State and Zip fields does it say, in glowing red letters

Must be a U.S. 2-letter postal code or state name

U.S. zip codes are like XXXXX or XXXXX-XXXX.

Might it be useful to mention this before you get people half-way through the entire purchase process?
(As a side note, as far as I know, there are currently zero legal television download options in Canada - no, not through iTunes either.)

Problem #3: Although "classic" Star Trek (i.e. the original series) was one of the shows to be on sale that got people all excited, it isn't on sale yet.  CBS shows under "classic" are: DS9, Voyager, Brady Bunch, Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy, MacGyver and Have Gun Will Travel.  Clicking to see episodes of any of these fails, e.g. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, see all episodes...

Your search - in_label:tvshow=Star_Trek_Deep_Space_Nine did not return any results.

Problem #4: One for the archivists - Google Video adds new video DRM.  So now we have DRM from Apple (FairPlay), Microsoft, Google and others.  Here's a question: once you authenticate, say a song from Apple, can you

a) continue to play that song forever, without re-connecting to the Internet at some point?
b) pass the song on to your heirs like any other piece of physical property when you die?  pass it on to a library?

I am particularly concerned about (a).  I suspect if you "buy" a song, authenticate, and then never reconnect to the Internet, it will eventually fail.  If that's the case, it means if the master DRM servers of these companies eventually fail or are shut down when they go out of business, the things you thought you owned will cease to work.

Google Video was a big CES announcement, although it was not live at that time.

The Google Video Blog also reports as of January 9 2006, Google Video's New Year

We have officially launched the Google Video store, the world's first open video marketplace.

Feature #1: You can, I think, set a price on your own videos, and watch the cash pour in.

TypePad adds video blogging support

We’re excited to announce two partnerships with companies that are making it easy to add video to your TypePad blog:  VideoEgg and Serious Magic. What’s great about these two products is that they provide two very different ways of video blogging, but they’re both great fits with TypePad.

from Video Blogging on TypePad

the video iPod and the iTunes community

The video iPod was foreseeable, here's what I wrote (elsewhere) in March 2005:

iTunes Video Store

I wondered why Apple put trailers inside of iTunes.

But I have figured it out.
Apple is building the platform for selling video downloads the same way they sell music downloads.

Why do they host trailers on their site at all?
Hmm, sort of a daily infrastructure test...

Why video inside iTunes?  iTunes is crossplatform... sales platform...

Steve has said that portable video (the "iPod Video") doesn't make sense. (There is already portable Mac video, it's called an iBook or PowerBook.) But downloading video to your desktop... or say the Mac Mini... Send the video over wireless to your TV like they do with the AirPort Express audio thing...

Notice how every time Steve does a talk he goes on and on about some new video thing the Mac can do? I thought he was wearing his Pixar hat, but he's actually building the Mac video infrastructure.

The man's a genius.

I still think video on the iPod is really the least important bit of the whole thing.
There's still the device challenge which they haven't overcome: we want devices to be as small as possible, but we want displays to be as big as possible, and interfaces to be a reasonable size.
I had thought they might at least do a 16:9 wide-angle display by turning the display sideways on the iPod and having a much smaller control area.

Plus which, mobile video seems a bit dubious to me.  The only time I use it is when I watch stuff on my laptop on airplanes.

This is the most interesting video part to me, which I haven't seen widely mentioned:

purchase ad-free episodes of your favorite ABC or Disney television shows and watch them on the go.

Here's what it says on the iTunes Videos page

Easy As It Looks

The virtual shelves of the iTunes Music Store now feature a video section. Music videos, Pixar shorts and select ABC and Disney television shows live right alongside songs, podcasts and audiobooks. Browse featured listings or search the archive to find just what you want, then click to buy. Once you do, you get stutter-free, ad-free video delivered directly to your desktop. From there, the sky’s the limit, because you own purchased video forever. Watch as many times as you choose, share between five computers, burn to data CDs or sync to the new iPod. Instant gratification never looked better. ...

TV Star

In addition to music videos, the iTunes Music Store also features select Disney and ABC television shows, ready to download. For $1.99, you can own the latest episode just one day after it airs. With full seasons of “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives” and “That’s So Raven,” plus episodes of new shows like “Night Stalker” and “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody” at your fingertips, you’ll never miss your favorites. Plus, you can sync shows to the new iPod and watch them on the go.

I strongly agree with Steve's "people want to own, not rent" model.
However, it's worth pointing out... this is the opposite model from the library model.

In any case, while the video is big news, there are also other developments that are just as important.
They are making iTunes into a community:

Send songs, albums, playlists, even music videos and TV episodes to anyone with an email address. ...

Get personalized recommendations, courtesy of the iTunes user community and a host of in-house music experts. Hear what's in store for you. ...

Post your own customer reviews and ratings, and read what over 10 million iTunes users worldwide have to say about what's playing on iTunes.

from iTunes - Download

Building communities is where the web action is.  You have to give people a reason to come to your site.

(No TV downloads available from the Canadian store yet.  The videos are all 320x240.  This posting is a bit of a cross-post.)

Google to host video

Move over blogging -- here comes Internet-based home video, to a Google server near you.

While there's no formal announcement yet, Google co-founder Larry Page said Monday that the well-known search engine concern would soon let the general public upload self-produced videos to Google's servers, partly in an effort to learn more about how to more efficiently search and display information about video-based data.

"It's an experiment we want to run," said Page of the video-uploading service, which he said the company will formally announce "in the next few days."

from Advanced IP Pipeline Google To Host Home-Video Uploads
via Slashdot Google Experiments with Video Blogging /.

I kind of feel like when the Windows people finally discovered audio and video, after the Mac and Amiga people had been using it for years.  The comments in Slashdot were good.  "They have reinvented USENET."  I had Internet video running on Sun SPARC workstations at Queen's University circa 1991.

Mefeedia videoblog aggregator

"Mefeedia.com is  an aggregator   for videobloggers. It lets you subscribe to videobloggers and tag videos."

audio and video RSS aggregator for MacOS X

ANT is an RSS video aggregator and media player currently available for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.

With ANT, you can subscribe to any RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures. ANT will automatically download fresh audio and video content for you to watch and listen to. It can playback any media format, and syncs audio files with iTunes so you can easily add them to your portable MP3 player.

www.AntIsNotTV.net

via Macintouch