Keeping an Eye on Technology Futures, No Hidden Agendas, New Attitudes, No Platitudes!
In January 2008, nearly 79 million users viewed over 3 billion videos on YouTube. As of April 2008, a YouTube search returned about 83.4 million videos and 3.75 million user channels. Estimates are that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.
A terabyte is one trillion bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. Just a few years ago, bandwidth of "terabytes/day" sounded like science fiction. Current estimates of Youtube's bandwidth are 200 Terabytes/day, or 72 petabytes per year. That's a lot of Libraries of Congress, and equivalent to a sustained 9.26 Giga bps data stream.
Here's how and why Youtube works for me: These days, most digital cameras take both stills and videos. A typical short video takes about 100MB of memory, so it's not something you can email; most servers don't allow over about 10-20MB per email. So, you'd have to copy your video to a CD (which holds about 700MB) and send it via snail-mail. But then, how many copies can you send?
With Youtube, you can upload a movie (in any video format) up to 10 minutes and 100MB, and within a few minutes, there's a link which anyone can use to view your video. Unregistered users can watch most videos, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Some people upload several hundred.
I can download a movie to Youtube and email the link to my list, or include it with an article I write. Within a day, several thousand people around the world can watch it, when they want, and as many times as they'd like. And it doesn't cost them (or me) a penny. That volume of traffic would overload my server, many times over.
Several hundred people responded to my recent email asking for feedback on my first attempt at making videos - thank you! Most thought the quality was acceptable. And I did receive a lot of good tips on lighting and other techniques, which I appreciated very much. I hope you'll keep track of my improvements.
Many reported that Youtube was blocked at work - bandwidth and other restrictions. Most like the idea, though everyone still wanted the text version of eNews - reading is much faster than watching a video. Plus text can be scanned, re-read, clipped, pasted and forwarded.
So, I'll continue with this text version of JimPinto.com eNews. And I'll include video-links whenever I think it's worthwhile.
My weekly "Pinto's Points" is published by ISA InTech eNews. Editor Greg Hale has asked me to include a video-link with each column. So, take a look at this weeks InTech eNews (weblink below) and I'll appreciate your comments and feedback.
