9781422277393

Tech 2.0

World-Changing Entertainment Companies

YouTube ® and Videos of Everything!

by Michael Centore

Tech 2.0 World-Changing Entertainment Companies

ESports: A Billion Eyeballs and Growing GoPro ® , Garmin ® , and Camera Drones Netflix ® , Amazon ® , Hulu ® , and Streaming Video Pixar ® , Disney ® , DreamWorks ® , and Digital Animation Spotify ® , Pandora ® , and Streaming Music YouTube ® and Videos of Everything!

Tech 2.0 World-Changing Entertainment Companies

YouTube ® and Videos of Everything!

by Michael Centore

Mason Crest

Mason Crest 450 Parkway Drive, Suite D Broomall, PA 19008 www.masoncrest.com © 2019 by Mason Crest, an imprint of National Highlights, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Series ISBN: 978-1-4222-4053-3 Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4222-4059-5 EBook ISBN: 978-1-4222-7739-3 First printing 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Produced by Shoreline Publishing Group LLC Santa Barbara, California Editorial Director: James Buckley Jr. Designer: Patty Kelley www.shorelinepublishing.com Cover photographs by Ian Allenden/Dreamstime.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Centore, Michael, 1980- author. Title: YouTube and videos of everything! / by Michael Centore. Description: Broomall, PA : Mason Crest, [2018] | Series: Tech 2.0 : world changing-entertainment companies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017053439| ISBN 9781422240595 (hardback) | ISBN 9781422240533 (series) | ISBN 9781422277393 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: YouTube (Firm)--Juvenile literature. | YouTube (Electronic resource)--Juvenile literature. | Online social networks--Juvenile literature. Classification: LCC TK5105.8868.Y68 C46 2018 | DDC 384.3/8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2017053439 QR Codes disclaimer: You may gain access to certain third party content (“Third-Party Sites”) by scanning and using the QR Codes that appear in this publication (the “QR Codes”). We do not oper- ate or control in any respect any information, products, or services on such Third-Party Sites linked to by us via the QR Codes included in this publication, and we assume no responsibility for any materials you may access using the QR Codes. Your use of the QR Codes may be subject to terms, limitations, or restrictions set forth in the applicable terms of use or otherwise established by the owners of the Third-Party Sites. Our linking to such Third-Party Sites via the QR Codes does not imply an endorsement or sponsorship of such Third-Party Sites, or the information, products, or services offered on or through the Third-Party Sites, nor does it imply an endorsement or sponsorship of this publication by the owners of such Third-Party Sites.

CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Chapter 1: Founding the Company . 10 Chapter 2: Going Viral . 24 Chapter 3: Game-Changing Technology . 38 Chapter 4: Into the Future . 50 Find Out More. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Series Glossary of Key Terms. . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Educational Videos: Readers can view videos by scanning our QR codes, providing them with additional educational content to supplement the text. Examples include news coverage, moments in history, speeches, iconic moments, and much more! Text-Dependent Questions: These questions send the reader back to the text for more careful attention to the evidence presented here. Sidebars: This boxed material within the main text allows readers to build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspectives by weaving together additional information to provide realistic and holistic perspectives. Words to Understand: These words with their easy-to-understand definitions will increase the reader’s understanding of the text, while building vocabulary skills. KEY ICONS TO LOOK FOR Research Projects: Readers are pointed toward areas of further inquiry connected to each chapter. Suggestions are provided for projects that encourage deeper research and analysis.

Series Glossary of Key Terms: This back-of-the-book glossary contains terminology used throughout this series. Words found here increase the reader’s ability to read and comprehend higher-level books and articles in this field.

Tech 2.0 Introduction

T he data is in and the results are clear—people spend a lot of time on YouTube: more than one billion hours per day, to be exact, when you add up the content watched by viewers all over the world. The fact that four hundred hours of video are uploaded every minute means there’s no shortage of clips to choose from. As of the end of 2017, YouTube is available in 88 countries and 76 languages. Its one billion active users—roughly one-third of everyone on the internet— make it the world’s second-most popular site after that of its owner, Google. What’s amazing about all of this is that YouTube was never intended to be such a massive platform, and one that now reaches some audiences more successfully than cable television. When site cofounder Jawed Karim uploaded the first YouTube video, a nineteen-second snippet of him at the San Diego Zoo, he probably had no idea what was to come: millions of home videographers creating, sharing, and commenting on each other’s posts, plus millions more professional filmmakers, advertisers, and pro- duction companies adding new stuff every day. It was a tremendous leap from the original idea for the site, which was to give friends and family a place to swap videos on an intimate scale. What makes YouTube’s technology so unique is its ability to “translate” all sorts of video languages into a single format that everyone can access. This means that vid- eos coming from different computers, phones, and cameras all over the world can be viewed easily by anyone once they’re uploaded to the site. Before this innovation, sending and receiving video files was a complicated process. YouTube has redefined the way we communicate visually, allowing us to document stories in our local com- munities, create “how-to” films that show how to tackle different tasks, and explore

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countries and cultures from all over the world. It’s also created a vibrant entertainment culture that can turn anyone with a good idea—and a web camera—into an overnight star. YouTube has launched the careers of celebrities including Justin Bie- ber, Andy Samberg, and The Weeknd, and given countless others a ve- hicle to share their talents. There’s also the phenomenon of the “viral video”—a short clip that quickly spreads through social media to gar- ner millions of views. Mainstream television now competes with You- Tube for viewers’ attention, and shows like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon have created their own YouTube channels to widen their audience.

Everyone can be a video star on YouTube or other online services.

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Like many tech startups, one cool thing about YouTube is its “do- it-yourself” origin story. It was founded in 2005 by three young soft- ware engineers from California who wanted to swap some videos they took at a dinner party. As they started to think about the possibilities of sharing videos over the internet rather than through email, their en- thusiasm for the idea began to grow. They went to work developing YouTube—first from a garage and then a small headquarters above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant in San Mateo—until it became one of the fastest-growing websites by summer 2006. Search engine giant Google scooped it up later that year for $1.65 billion, and its dominance as a video and entertainment destination has only grown from there. In this book we’ll take a deeper look at YouTube’s history, as well as some of the technology that lets you search and share videos fromall over the world. We’ll find out howYouTube is changing themedia land- scape, letting people create and share their own content and becoming a bigger part of our lives than television. We’ll also see how YouTube is used in industries outside of entertainment, such as in advertising and instructional videos, and the services YouTube’s competitors are offer- ing to gain an edge. And we’ll take a peek into what the future might have in store for YouTube, from interactive games to live-action sports. With its immense popularity and innovative approach, YouTube should be an entertainment leader for years to come.

Introduction

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1 Founding the Company

L ike many tech startups , YouTube’s story begins in the San Francisco Bay Area (left), the region around the cities of San Francisco and Oakland in northern California. In the southern part of the Bay Area is “Silicon Valley,” a nickname given because so many tech companies—including Google, Apple, Pixar, and Facebook—are head- quartered there. (Silicon is a key ingredient in making computer chips, on which all those companies’ products rely.) Silicon Valley has been known as an epicenter of computer innovation since the 1970s. One of the most successful Silicon Valley companies of the late 1990s was PayPal, a pioneer in the technology of online money trans- fers. As the World Wide Web was becoming more and more a part of WORDS TO UNDERSTAND bandwidth  a measurement of the data transferred from a website to the site’s visitor beta test the public test of a computer product before its official release codec  a type of software that processes video files to make them easier to send and receive

fortuitous  when something happens by a lucky chance startup  a new business designed to meet an emerging need stocks  shares of a company that can be bought and sold

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people’s daily lives, PayPal’s software enabled users to purchase things from online vendors instead of having to write checks or send money orders. Today, many merchants allow customers to pay them directly using a PayPal account. The three young men who would go on to create YouTube— Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim—all met when they worked for PayPal. They were among the first employees after the company launched in 1998. Chen and Karim had met as students at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where they both studied computer science. Hurley majored in fine arts at the Indi- ana University of Pennsylvania, developing skills that would come in handy when he designed the YouTube logo a few years later.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Birthplace of YouTube.

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PayPal did not exist for long be- fore it had a potential buyer. In 2002, it was offered as a publicly traded compa- ny, which meant that anyone could buy stocks and invest in PayPal. A growing online auction website, eBay, saw ways it would benefit from using PayPal. PayPal could make eBay’s service even more popular than it already was be- cause customers would be able to pay sellers in a safer, more secure way. EBay seized on the opportunity to acquire PayPal and bought the service for $1.5 billion in 2002. Dinner Plans

YouTube founders started with money made from PayPal.

T he sale of PayPal made the company’s employees a lot of mon- ey. Some stayed, but many of the core team left to pursue their own ventures. Chen, Hurley, and Karim all left within a few years of the sale, but they continued to keep in touch, meeting up for dinners throughout the Bay Area. On one very fortuitous meet-up in 2005, they came up with the idea for YouTube. Chen had just bought a home in San Francisco and wanted to show it off to his friends, so he invited them over for a dinner par- ty. Everyone was taking videos and photos with their digital cam- eras. After the party, they wanted to share their memories of the evening with each other. They found they could share the photos easily through image-sharing sites like Flickr. Emailing them was

1: Founding the Company

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Codecs and Containers A digital video file is made up of two parts: the codec and the container. The codec is used to compress the file, mean- ing that it takes a large amount of data and makes it smaller. This allows the file to be more easily transferred, stored, and streamed. The codec also decompresses, or expands, the file. This restores the file to its initial size. The container is a collection of information about the digital video file itself, in- cluding its images, sound, and any other components. To put it another way, containers “contain” all the parts of a video, while codecs encode and decode its data. Codec names are highly technical, but you might recognize some popular con- tainer file names including AVI, WMV, and MOV. another option. Videos couldn’t be shared as easily. “They were too big to email back and forth,” Chen later explained, but that wasn’t the only difficulty. “You had to download different things based on what digital cameras people had.” These extra steps were a hassle. There were many different video formats, and each one used a different language, or codec . Without that codec, a movie was unwatchable. Sharing videos over the internet seemed to be more trouble than it was worth for the average user, so most people just gave up and didn’t even try. “We really started to see that this was an unmet need, not just recently, but from all the way stretching back to the first videos that were taken,” Chen said. “They were just living on computers and they

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