Lauren Weinstein on Nostr: This is the script of my national radio report last Monday regarding YouTube, which ...
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.
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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.
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L
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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.
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L