• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

It's You. It's YouTube.: Web Site of Video Postings is a Homegrown Entertainment Hit

Posted on: Tuesday, 14 March 2006, 12:00 CST

By Sam McManis, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Mar. 14--Fade in to an overhead shot of a living-room carpet, where a diaper-clad baby is lying on his background.

For 1 minute and 23 seconds, the little guy is making Sisyphean attempts to roll over onto his tummy. His legs kick, arms flail and back arches with each failed try. There is no audio, so the open-mouthed cries bring to mind Edvard Munch's "The Scream." At one point, his dad straightens the blanket, but does not help Junior. Hey, a kid's gotta make it on his own someday, right?

Fade to black.

It's all part of a home video by Sacramento mom and cinema verite buff Katie Feldman, who uploaded the clip for the world to watch on the video-sharing Web site YouTube.com - which in a few short months has shot from an obscure online enterprise to arguably the hottest trend in pop culture.

The site averages 25 million hits a day as Web surfers seek out music videos, short films and a bevy of visual oddities. Not surprisingly, the high traffic also has caught the eye of the mainstream media, which has gone after YouTube for allowing posts of copyrighted material.

And, by the way, that baby - Brian Feldman Jr. - is 2 1/2 now. His mother proudly reports that he has long since mastered the art of rolling over. But for the 40 or so people who have watched the clip on YouTube, little Brian will remain forever on his back.

"My friends and family watch it," says Feldman, who has a blog and personal Web site that link with YouTube. "But if more people watch it, cool."

Same sentiment for Joseph Inovero, a 35-year-old Sacramento resident whose faux band "The Mischievous Boys" hilariously lip-synch pop songs for all to enjoy. Indeed, Inovero and friends have scored a measure of YouTube fame with two versions of Madonna's "Hung Up," which have totalled 71,185 page views in two months - and counting.

"We get mail from all over the world," Inovero says. "We love the attention."

YouTube, like MySpace before it, has captured the attention - nay, fascination - of a tech-savvy populace seeking self-expression or just an afternoon's amusement.

Founders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, who work out of San Mateo with a staff of 20, say they didn't expect - at least not so quickly - such a huge user response.

When YouTube debuted last May in its "preview period" - read: the site was still experimenting - it drew an average of 32,000 viewers per day. By Dec. 15, when YouTube launched with $2 million in funding from a venture capital group, it had 3 million hits a day. As of March 1, it's risen to 25 million.

"People like to share experiences," says Hurley, who also serves as chief executive officer. "They like to be entertained. That's what we've turned into, essentially - an entertainment platform. We started it with the idea of solving a problem - how to share video online with friends; you couldn't do it on e-mail. Now, it's just taken off."

In other words, it's not just your amateur auteur's site anymore. YouTube is being used by major music labels, including Warner Bros. and EMI, to promote "viral marketing" of bands. Nike has planted ads featuring athletes doing amazing feats in their shoes.

Backlash, however, has come from rivals in the broadcast medium. NBC ordered YouTube to pull pirated video clips from "Saturday Night Live" and other programs, while CBS successfully stopped the showing of a popular news report featuring an autistic high school basketball player.

Hurley says YouTube has complied with every request to remove copyrighted video, although he sees a day when the site will be working in tandem with mainstream media. Already, YouTube has signed a licensing agreement with MTV2.

"In the online space, we've found we can help traditional media guys get exposure they ordinarily wouldn't get in the online world," Hurley says. "I think we're on new ground here."

But videos featuring celebrities or products is only part of the content - and appeal - of YouTube. The bulk of the site still comes from average users.

Their contributions range from skate punks showing off their latest grinds to stunts eligible for David Letterman's "stupid human tricks." One recent top-viewed clip (YouTube keeps a tally and ranks them) was of a gymnast from Langley, British Columbia, doing tricks on a trampoline, including hanging from the rafters. Number of page views: 360,896.

Sacramentans have made their presence felt on the site, too, big time.

One user uploaded a strange 31-second clip of a bobbleheaded doll of the Kings' Brad Miller, well, bobbing. Another's showed a shirtless man jumping into water at Discovery Park from a rope swing. Yet another is titled "Bored in Roseville." For 18 seconds, a man just looks depressed.

Perhaps the strangest local offering - at least, recently - came from Kellyn Wong, 19, a first-year student at UC Davis. Just seven seconds long, it's called "Sasha and Phil's Toe."

The scene is a living room couch, where members of a campus hip-hop group are seated. They erupt into laughter when a young woman, the aforementioned Sasha, leans over and licks the big toe of friend Phil. Everyone laughs. End of video.

Wong says it was meant just to be seen by friends. But more than 150 people have viewed it so far.

"It's a bit creepy that some random person could just watch the video," Wong says. "But if I was really concerned, I wouldn't have posted the video in the first place. Hopefully, Phil and Sasha don't mind that their little escapade is potentially exposed to the entire world."

That apparently isn't an issue for other local YouTube uploaders. Inovera and his lip-synching crew, for instance, have contributed more than 25 clips.

"There's one guy who even made a video of watching our video," Inovera says. "That was pretty cool."

For Sacramentan Melvin Townsend, 39, a counselor for troubled youth, sharing his videos satisfies his creative urges. One is a music video of his friend singing the praises of Sactown, with images of the city flashing on the screen.

"It was always difficult to share my mini-productions with family and friends because it was too much of a hassle to put it on a disc and pay for the postage, or the file was too big to e-mail," Townsend says.

"Now, you just upload it and YouTube puts it on (the Web)."

It may sound simple, but YouTube's creators say there's a reason this service hadn't been done before.

"The back end for us is a killer," says Julie Supan, YouTube's marketing director. "We have only 20 employees, and we're handling 200 terabytes of data per day - almost a third of Google's or Yahoo's traffic."

But Hurley and Chen are techies from way back, helping to develop Pay Pal, which allows Internet users to pay for online purchases via a safe third-party account.

The idea for the YouTube site, Hurley says, came after a dinner party with colleagues several years ago.

"We had such a difficult time sharing a video file from that evening because it was too large for e-mail and took too much time online," Hurley recalls. "We started working to make it work."

Here is how it works: Users sign up with YouTube to start their own home page, a la MySpace. They can then store videos in a favorites folder and, from there, e-mail them to friends.

Supan says YouTube is able to do this because of a provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which states that streaming media sites are responsible only for promptly shutting down videos if a copyright holder protests.

Sites, in other words, are not legally obligated to check every video for content or copyright. Which is fortunate, Supan says, since YouTube streams 115 videos per second.

"Once it's brought to our attention, we can instantly remove the content," Hurley says. "Since we're a centralized system that hosts and streams, rather than lets people download, once they are removed, they are removed."

Until they pop up again.

A month ago, an uploader illegally put a "Saturday Night Live" skit called "Lazy Sunday" on YouTube. In two days, it got 500,000 views - 10 times more than the version on "Saturday Night Live's" own Web site. NBC promptly sent a formal notice to YouTube to remove all NBC content, citing 500 videos as examples.

YouTube complied. But the video keeps popping up, like a Hydra-headed monster.

Shortly after the NBC controversy, a CBS Evening News report about an autistic basketball player drew 1.2 million hits on YouTube in four days. CBS made no formal complaint to YouTube officials, but CBS senior vice president Betsy Morgan wrote on the network's blog that "it's uncool for people to take our video without permission. ... This stuff should come back to the core site - otherwise, it's theft."

Supan says YouTube took down the video after a reporter from Daily Variety read CBS' response.

"We reached out to them," Supan says. "We weren't violating anything in the DMCA."

The most popular category on YouTube - music videos - also is the one that potentially is most fraught with copyright issues. But contemporary acts, such as Death Cab For Cutie, are doing promotions on YouTube. And classic acts such as the Grateful Dead apparently see the value of old concert footage being exposed to new eyes and ears.

"The most progressive companies know the value of promotional shortform content and seek us out," Supan says. "The music industry totally gets it. We see the future of our site as a combination of user and branded content."

One thing that avid YouTube users, such as Sacramento's Townsend, want the site to retain in the midst of all this fast growth is its global-village, amateur vibe.

"I like the little videos that are natural, real and clean," Townsend says. "The videos that people submit take you to their city, living room, hangout or anywhere. It's like traveling in one click."

-----

Copyright (c) 2006, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

NASDAQ-NMS:GOOG, NASDAQ-NMS:YHOO,

Source: The Sacramento Bee

More News in this Category