YouTube Founders Interviewed

An anonymous reader writes: "FORTUNE's Adam Lashinsky interviews co-founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. 'In just five months, YouTube has gone from beta testing to part of the national zeitgeist. The website is a place where anyone with a home video can post it online and create an endlessly entertaining diversion for bored office workers -- who've been watching 40 million clips a day.'"

Where is the Interview??/

[Amouth]

That was more like a side conversation while three gusy where waiting for coffee in the morning.. I want to see details (servers, bandwidth, cost, space) what they use to manage it.. (i know it is home built but what is it like?)

that is a lame interview and told us nothing more than we all already new (except that they work for paypal)

not trolling here just pointing out

What is the cost?

[bogaboga]

I wonder how those guys pay for the bandwidth. How are they handling this? When I visited their site, I saw no advertising - none!

My request though, is to have full video controls on thier player. The same applies to Google Video by the way. Many a times, the videos simply need some light.

But many thanks to thier effort.

Re:Fluff

[rayde]

how would youtube honestly have any fundamental difference to any other host.. say geocities, which is just as capable (albiet not as user friendly) of hosting videos? just because they offer a convenient means of playing the videos back doesn't necessarily mean they should be treated differently than any other host. they wash their hands of it and let the content providers take up issues on a case-by-case basis.

YouTube: Running a company like it's 1999.

[natrius]

One simple question: How does YouTube plan to make any money? Right now they're making $0 and spending tons on bandwidth. The main reason people visit the site in the first place is for content that's infringing on someone's copyright: TV shows, commercials and similar fare. There are a few user-created videos that actually draw traffic, but still, that traffic is pure loss. The only thing of value they have is the brand name. Everyone at my college talks about wasting time on YouTube, but their technology itself is worth next to nothing because it's so easy to build. That's my YouTube has so [google.com] many [vimeo.com] competitors. [revver.com] If they don't get bought by anyone, they're screwed.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's a good time to be living off of VC money. It's fairly clear that many of them are being advised by underpants gnomes.

Google Video Search?

[eBayDoug]

If google rapidly integrated video search, would that screw youtube's plans?

Just a matter of time

[Jonboy X]

I'm sure I'm not the first to think this, but this YouTube thing kinda reminds me of the early days of Napster. They get VC, they spend it allowing people to share copyrighted media, they try to conjure a revenue stream out of a free service, they hope to turn "legit" before the federales shut 'em down, they go halfway and alienate all their users, et cetera. I don't know why these doofuses think this will turn out any differently.

Could it really be that the VC's know this, and have decided that getting the name "YouTube" branded into young people's minds and associated with internet video is worth all the blown money?

(Partial) Substitute for Broadcast Entertainment..

[rewinn]

While it would be naiive to suggest sites like youtube would fully replace entertainment developed for the masses, noticable audience share may be drawn away as Youtube & its ilk not only radically drop the transaction costs of (short) video entertainment but, more importantly, provide search and rating capability .

For example, which is more likely to provide a solid hour of laughs: watching an hour of Saturday Night Live and hope for two or three funny scetches, or searching YouTube for a dozen bits of comedy that have been highly rated?

Re:YouTube: Running a company like it's 1999.

[natrius]

Now that I've actually read the article, I should probably reply to my own post. Advertising is not going to cut it, especially if they're the first ones to do it. Users will flock to the other services, and Google has a lot more money to waste on hilarious karaoke videos [google.com] than YouTube's VCs do. One by one, these video hosting services will start putting up ads, and their users will flock to Google Video. Lots of people embed YouTube videos on their websites, but if they have a choice between a video with ads and one without, which are they going to choose to subject their readers to?

Their plan is to build as large of a user base as possible by luring them in with ad-free videos, then throw ads in their face to make money off of them. It isn't going to work unless they can outspend Google. Unlikely.

Just a fad.

[ImaNihilist]

YouTube is just a fad. As soon as the venture capital dries up they won't be able to afford the bandwidth without massive advertising. As soon as they add that, visitors will start dropping like flies. YouTube is no different than AtomFilms or iFilm. Same shit, different day. AtomFilms used to be the big video content host. Then the adds started poppin' and the hits started droppin'.

YouTube I find is limited

[CrackedButter]

I go to YouTube once or Twice a week, I'd go more often if I could download individual clips from the site rather than play it in my browser. I want to keep them on a longer term basis rather than keep downloading something over and over again if and when friends come round wanting to watch something.

Re:Where is the Interview??/

[bedessen]

You cannot possibly be suggesting that you can compare some shitty cablemodem to the kind of thing you get at a datacenter. Residential broadband is almost always highly asynchronous (the upload is only a fraction of the download rate), it has tons of restrictions (usage caps, cop-out clauses, etc), and it is typically oversold by ratios of 100:1 or more. This means you aren't actually paying for the true cost of the bandwidth, you are paying a fraction of it because most people don't come anywhere clost to using the full amount.

"Real" bandwidth has none of this BS. You get a SLA. You get an engineer on the phone when it breaks. You get a dedicated and provisioned port on a router. You can run it flat out at full duty cycle (100% utilization) continuously without any kind of "you've used too much" bullshit that residential ISPs like to pull. The speeds are synchronous and are contractually guaranteed, none of that "up to X mbps but sometimes much less because you have crappy wiring" stuff. Your equipment is stored in a location that has redundant power supplies, diesel generators, raised floors, heavy duty cooling, and sophisticated fire alarm/control systems.

"Real" bandwidth costs real money. The stuff you get with a cablemodem is not real bandwidth, and it appropriately costs only a fraction. When you realize the difference between the two you will realize that from a cost standpoint comparing what you get from your residential cable company to what a large site like youtube has to use, they are in totally and completely different leagues.