The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Seven or eight years ago, designing a new website for the school in Snow Lake, I came up with the wise idea that I wanted to include a few short videos about our school that people could watch. ItÕs a good thing that I was new to web design at that point or I would have known much better. First of all, seven or eight years ago, video editing software was very expensive, clunky and difficult to use. You had to figure out how to hook up cameras to computers, pray that hard drives were big enough to hold the data you were importing and then fight with commands to try to make some kind of picture that meant something. If you managed to make your way though that and actually finish a video, you then had to export it into a format that people might possibly be able to watch, and then finally use another piece of software to compress your story down to a size that people might be able to download because there was no such thing as streaming video or watching them online. Videos had to be small because almost no one had high-speed Internet service. A file bigger than four or five megabytes in size stood almost no chance of ever getting watched. My, how times have changed. Now my nine-year-old son sits on YouTube and has access to hundreds of thousands of different things to watch. When he gets stuck playing a video game, the first thing he does is head to this site to find hints that other people have uploaded. The kids in my class at school come in several times a week ranting about the latest thing theyÕve watched online or the latest speech made by any political candidate that can be watched at any time. As of March 17, over 150,000 new videos were being uploaded to YouTube each day. This is over 78 million total pieces. While many of them are not well done, with that many videos, it is estimated that it would take over 412 years to watch them all. Another major change that YouTube has brought is that over 80 per cent of its content is made and uploaded by amateurs. Professionally-made content is estimated to only be 14 per cent of the total material on YouTube. This is a big change. In the past, video was something that really belonged to professionals. It required expensive equipment to make and to edit. But this is true no more. Many laptops now come with webcams built in to them, and for 40 or 50 dollars, you can buy one for your desktop computer. The next steps with video are with sites such as Ustream, which allow you to stream your own content live like a TV station. You can also use Operator 11 to work with up to seven other people online to make a single show. Seesmic allows you to record video on your cell phone and upload it as well. All of these sites working with video means that YouTube is considering changes to keep it ahead. Two things are in the rumour mill for the site. The first is that YouTube will soon allow people to upload and watch high definition content. The site currently converts everything you upload to flash video, which are small files that load quickly. But the pictures are often not the best quality. Now that more people are getting faster Internet service, they can handle larger files and so this sounds like a possibility. The second rumour is that they will soon allow people to stream live video over their site. This seems a little more far fetched to me, as it will change their business completely. Other sites are already doing this, so YouTube will have to play catch-up if they decide to take this on. Anyway you look at it, video is now fast, easy, and has definitely changed. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
