

Jawed Karim: How YouTube Took Off (2006) - alexitosrv
http://gigaom.com/2006/10/26/jawed-karim-how-youtube-took-off/

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sfphotoarts
Its touched on a little, but I don't think the features like comments and so
on were the trigger. Most of the sites that offered video back then all had
some funky player that required downloading some codec that only worked half
the time. Youtube just worked everywhere thanks to Flash. If they had gone
with a less ubiquitous format, even if they had all the other features they
mention, I don't think it would be what it is today.

The biggest take away for me from this was just how recent this whole video
UGC thing is. Its hard to imagine a world without YouTube now.

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cameldrv
I think that a huge portion of the success of YouTube is not just the not
having a codec issue, but the immediate start of the videos. Sites like iFilm
in particular, were around for a number of years before YouTube, but before
Flash 7, they all had buffering delays. If you remember back with RealAudio
1.0, there was no buffering, and so every time a packet dropped, the sound
would cut out. The response to this was to buffer up for 15-20 seconds before
starting playback. This worked ok if you knew you wanted to listen or watch
something, and it was long. What Adobe seemed to realize was that you're
better off starting immediately and building up your buffer as you go along.
You may get some stuttering at the beginning, but it's a small price to pay
for starting immediately.

Starting the video immediately made YouTube addictive, literally. Shortening
the time between following a link and seeing something funny makes the user
want to click again.

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kailashbadu
In the video he touches on several points crucial for a successful startup
including believing in your idea when no one does. Paradoxically, unlike many
startup founders (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft) who left schools to focus on their
business, he chose the opposite course and left business to join graduate
school at Stanford just when YouTube was taking off. If he departed because he
never expected YouTube to be a runaway hit (a belief augmented by initial
hiccups YouTube met with) or if it was genuinely the allure of academia that
he couldn’t resist is anybody’s guess. Does he regret having left YouTube in
haste?

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lvecsey
As I expected, it didn't mention the fortitude they had to fend of lawsuits
over the copyrighted clips that were prevalent early on. That alone drove a
large part of the growth.

On the flip side, a more subtle point that held them back a bit was an
overwhelming community sense of _not_ linking to youtube videos in many
discussion forums, because it seemed like unnecessary advertising for their
brand. That sentiment was short lived due to the soon to be overwhelming
benefit of those aforementioned copyrighted hosted clips.

