Author: T. Y. Fam
Research Assignment

1. Introduction

YouTube is a very popular free video sharing web site which lets users to upload and share their video clips. This company founded in February 2005 by only three employees of PayPal. YouTube services are using Adobe Flash technology to compress normal video format and broadcast it to public. The variety of content includes personal videos, movie, TV programs and music videos. Some other services such as blogging, channels are also included in YouTube services. Within a short while, YouTube has now become a very famous website and now staffed by 67 employees [1].

According to statistic, YouTube attracts 6 million of visitors each day to watch an average two minutes video online. Users all over the world stock up the site with 30 to 40 thousands homemade or ripped video of entertainment, silly comedy, cartoon or TV episodes everyday. The main problem for YouTube would be the copyright materials on the website. They tend to shortened and limit the movie length to 10 minutes to prevent from user uploading full movie. In fact, this did not actually solve the problems; users still can split the video into smaller segment and upload it to YouTube [1].

2. State of the art

YouTube choose Adobe Flash as a tool to broadcast their media because compressed flash based videos are much smaller than the usual one. This will be the state of the art of sharing videos with flash compressed format compared to the old day’s video sharing technology which required a very fast internet connection. Why YouTube is so famous? Because Chad and Hurley designed it so that everyone can post everything they like in minutes. This is something like a TV station which people can publish everything they like. Members can post comment their comment on videos or setting up their own site on YouTube [4].

3. Advantages

Flash was developed and used for multimedia purposes. With the new flash version 6 to 8 the capability of video steaming, new format called FLV has been build to broadcast flash video. FLV separates stream able content and the flash movie into two file. The flash movie will act like a video player and load the stream able content into it and run the video. A FLV file contains at most one audio and video stream only. Audio supported a variety of sound format such as MP3, ADPCM as well as uncompressed sound. Previous flash version only supports Sorenson H.263 video codec as a standard. But the latest flash technology allows a new video format called “Screen Video”, which is a simple screen capturing video format [6].

Flash video eliminated the need of forcing clients to use anything they don’t like, for example some users may prefer QuickTime than RealPlayer. The main reason is none of the video player in the market has 100% compatibility to all video formats. This is where Flash has huge advantages over other video players. FLV videos often only can be played in specially constructed FLV players. Therefore even if user capture the video file is it very hard to re-playing the video.

Flash multimedia often supports by most browsers and the flash player is free to download. All the conversion is done by the YouTube, users do not need to worry about the conversion methods. Users can upload all types of compression format videos to YouTube and it will do the job and converting them into flash based video in about 5 minute’s time. By using flash, it’s eliminated the required of video decoder to view any kind of compressed video format. YouTube also make sharing videos become so easy compared to the old time where user has to find a host to host their video and often it is not free.

4. Disadvantages

There are disadvantages for using flash as a broadcast media such as video frame rate and sound quality. Video compressed by YouTube Flash engine often low frame rate, unless the source file is in a very good quality of compression. When video is uploaded to YouTube, they actually decode the video into raw video and then re-encode into flash format video. Video frame size will be scaled to 320 x 240 and frame rate in around 25 to 30 fps. Total video rate will be somewhere around 200 kbps. For the audio compression, stereo audio will be reduced to mono and re-encoded in a lower bit rate [2]. All these re-encoding steps are the wait time for an average of 5 minutes for each video to be completed and published to YouTube community.

200 kbps video quality is considered very low compared to DVD and DV compression. DVD has a video rate of 8 mbps and DV have around 25 mbps. There is no way YouTube compression can be compared to DVD or DV format. Video quality is more than 10 times greater than YouTube compression [2]. Normally if video was recorded out door, most scenes will have lots of fine-grained detail object which usually will be throwing away during compression thus the video quality often in poor quality. In order to compress a good quality video, less movement and motion and indoor environment will greatly increase the video quality output by YouTube. Even if we have to take video outdoors, the use of tripod can greatly reduce video information rate and will still look good in a low bit rates flash video [2].

5. Impact in the next 5 years

Big companies such as Google and Microsoft’s MSN have launched video services on their sites. But none of them come close to YouTube popularity. The success of YouTube has drowned the attention of mainstream media. Marketers such as advertiser are already interested in looking for ways to invest in YouTube technology. Lucian James, president of Agenda Inc., a brand marketing firm says that “It comes at a perfect time when brands are looking beyond the 30 seconds commercial and are looking for new ways to connect to their audience” [3]. This shows that the impact to TV industry where advertiser may try to put their advertisement on YouTube while still getting the same amount of viewers compared to TV.

The strength of YouTube is the ability of connect audience across the world. 16 millions US users attracted in July came from 63.4 Million total unique worldwide users. Which mean YouTube is the best promotional device in US such as delivering advertisement to younger audiences. With the popularity of global visitors, the different in brand borders such as US and Chinese will no longer exist in 5 to 10 years time. Delivery methods will be global in the future and programs will work in multiple countries.

Some major companies such as Nike Inc, has used YouTube to broadcast a clip of soccer star Ronaldinho showing off with a new pair of shoes. About million of users watched the clip and giving their comments. Satellite TV service like BSkyB, the distributor of The Simpsons posted their live action animation shows intro to promote in Britain. Music Company such as Matador Records also starts marketing several bands on YouTube by specifically creating video contest to attract bands all over the world [3].

Other than the impact on entertainment, the effect of posting educational purposed video can be obtain a good result as well. For example, the White House is distributing government produced anti-drug videos on YouTube. The video features 30 seconds advertisement of “a teenager running from a snaring dog and bemoaning pressure from his friends to smoke marijuana” [5]. This video was previously published on TV and now the government put them on YouTube. The government linked its video with the search tags “war on drugs”, “peer-pressure”, “marijuana”, “weed”, “ONDCP” and “420” which often the keywords for drugs. Few thousands of YouTube users had watched some of the government’s videos and it is completely free compared to TV broadcasting. Again, this shows that the usefulness of flash based videos not only for entertainment purposed but also for educational purpose [5].

Even though the size of a flash en-coded video is smaller then the usual video, the size still stays in around few megabytes. The impact to internet service provider may be effected by this technology, because everyone is watching video online compared to the old days which the majority of internet user only use the internet to check mails. Internet service provider may need to invest and increase their broadband speed and adjust their packages. The popularity of videos sharing may also increase the speed of internet technology development due to the demand of internet users.

6. Copyrighted problem

YouTube seems to look very good in the future, but the freedom that’s YouTube provided may resulted a downfall in the future. Most of the users have been posting copyrighted video, without the required legal approval from authors. These videos including clips from the TV prime-time shows, Hollywood movies, Olympics games and music videos. Major companies such as NBC and CBS have taken actions to YouTube. YouTube solved these problems by taking down all the requested video from their host. However, YouTube usually do not take any actions on copyrighted videos unless they have been warned or action has been taken by the video original authors [4]. Nonetheless, there are still tons of copyrighted videos on YouTube because some authors may not have the ability to take any action on them.

7. Conclusion

The future of video sharing is very hard to be predictable; will it be the next NBC or the next Napster? YouTube might become a new era of web multimedia and benefits everyone users all over the world. New technology has to be implemented in order to detect copyrighted videos and preventing them from being published to the internet. This will be a hard decision for them because if the removed all copyrighted material which is often good and fun clips, YouTube may lost most of the visitors that they having now. They have invested about $3.5 million on it, it is doubt that how they can earn their own money in five years time while dealing with all the pirated content. However, if copyrighted problem can be solved then no doubt YouTube technology will be the key success on introducing new technique to web multimedia technology.

References

1. Wiki, “YouTube” 2006; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

2. J. Thompson and J. K. Tumlinson, “Making Movies” 2006; http://blogs.chron.com/makingmovies/archives/2006/04/ youtube_and_the.html

3. S. K. Goo, “Five Months After Its Debut, YouTube Is a Star” 2006; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/30/ AR2006043001040.html

4. H. Green, “YouTube way beyong home videos” 2006; http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_15/b3979093.htm

5. CNN, “White House uploads anti-drug videos to YouTube” 2006, http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/09/19/youtube.drug.policy.ap/ index.html?section=cnn_tech

6. K. Rechert, “Video and Audio Streaming with Flash and Open Source Tools” 2005, http://klaus.geekserver.net/flash/streaming.html

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