> "I think we should talk to them, if nothing else to make it more expensive for Yahoo."
Love this.
Another thing: Jeff Huber thought that having 2.5 Google engineers would be enough to outcompete YouTube at the time. Given that they eventually acquired YouTube for over $1B, was that essentially paying for their ~2 best engineers?
YouTube grew explosively between the time of these messages (Nov 2005) and their Nov 2006 acquisition.
I made my Reddit account in Nov 2005, and remember for the first half of that period, YT was just one of several competing video sites, particularly in the shadow of one called throwawayyourtv.com (see https://www.reddit.com/domain/throwawayyourtv.com/ )
Then suddenly by the end of the summer, YT was pulling away from the pack, seemingly unstoppable.
1. They took full advantage of DMCA and pirated videos made easy home there until copyright notice came in. No technology to try and do it before upload, no pre publish human intervention.
2. YouTube player was just better, especially with most of the globe on dial up. It would let videos buffer for hours until 100%, even if you had a disconnection it would just restart downloading as it should. Won’t just stop after some time to preserve bandwidth. Once downloaded, videos won’t restream and you could easily move on timeline so long as you kept the browser window open. None of their competitors did this as I recall and were preserving bandwidth they would never get to use.
> Won’t just stop after some time to preserve bandwidth.
All online video players did this (continue buffer until 100%) at the time. It's the simpler and more naive option.
In fact, YouTube was the first to introduce the feature that it didn't pre-buffer the whole thing to save bandwidth many years later, and it was HUGELY controversial in the geek community.
Youtube's flash player was massively superior to plugin-based quicktime/windows media/mystery google thing. (Several replies and nobody has mentioned it, it was a huge factor.)
Also you could just name a song and Youtube had the music video - it was the "napster" of video.
YouTube was so popular on MySpace (that just allowed you to add random HTML… yeah that was a thing) that MySpace panicked for a while and added some javascript to make youtube videos not “clickable”; you could not click through to the YouTube page, just to play the video.
People would upload music videos and embed them on their profile, back when the "Embed HTML" feature was still novel. The player made it easy for users to copy/paste to their own profile, and then network effects kicked and the rest is history.
I was at the parent company at the time and through the News Corp acquisition, and remember the shit show when MySpace first banned YT embeds in late 2005 and again in 2006 ("for security"). Lot of internal bitterness that YT was riding their coattails.
It’s funny how people forget history so quickly. Even Facebook’s story is simply forgotten. Fb does what google can’t … copy features and products, and cannibalize their own audience when a product is obsolete/outdated.
Google usually tries to copy, but launches as a separate product.
Or they buy and mess it up.
Facebook is good at both integrating acquisitions, and at copying features and leveraging their userbase.
YT beat sites founded later because they were too late to catch up with the network effects.
YT beat sites founded earlier (and there were many) because browser, codec, and bandwidth technology just wasn’t ready yet to support decent web video.
YT beat contemporaneous sites, perhaps, because they were (as far as I know) the only one around in early 2006 with serious funding. ThrowAwayYourTV.com, for instance, was just one dude in his 20’s who had another day job.
It was mostly better content, but also it just worked. Many of the other sites didn’t work well. Video sites are actually very complex engineering-wise and have lots of moving parts.
Additionally, some turned on ads right away, which people hated. There was also YouTube embeds. The site just felt fun.
By contrast, Google Video had very little good content. There wasn’t anything fun about it. Whereas YouTube had a social aspect to it, Google Video felt like a VCR.
I personally remember around that time that watching a video was pretty hit-or-miss, but YouTube always seemed to work. I've also heard that they focused on supporting the max possible number of codecs for upload, so uploaders were less likely to hit problems as well. I think both of those could have played a large part in their success.
Others mentioned it, but I think a big chunk of it was it "just worked" thanks to their flash-based video player. Everyone already had flash installed, so when they went to youtube video worked. Google video needed some other plugin installed before it would work.
It's always struck me as a classic early example of someone coming up with a solution that I'm sure they thought was technically better, but users don't care about that.
From my perspective, it was their embeddable video player. You'd see it pop up in other sites, spreading the YouTube name on external sites the web-over. I remember thinking that capability was extremely cool at the time (and built off things like iframe chatboxes and embeddable hit counters.)
I believe lazy Sunday was actually the inflection point for YouTube.. the YouTube version got shared way more than other sites… and (because?) it stayed up the whole time.
One thing I distinctly remember they _weren't_ doing better was letting you just watch your video in piece. The controls were obtrusive and always visible, the background was bright white, and the suggested videos took up a huge chunk of the screen. I don't know how much that may have played to their advantage (by encouraging you to surf new videos) but I remember avoiding YouTube links in favor of basically anything else for a good long while.
I'd consider all of those "bugs" to be features, myself. As they say in French, everyone has gout. The autohiding controls and loss of the always-visible time bar really ticked me off when they happened, and backgrounds other than white annoy the hell out of me.
I was also on Reddit at the time and noticed something funny on YouTube, it'd recommend other videos featured on Reddit because their algo saw unrelated videos being watched by the same group so thought it should recommend the others, although they were irrelevant.
Jeff Huber did not think that. [redacted], the product manager of Google Videos, wrote the 1.5 engineers comment and "we have all of their [Youtube's] features in our q4 plan".
The email thread indicates that [redacted] wanted Google Video to win and wasn't listening to Jeff. Jeff then raised the Youtube acquisition with his peers, and then to their CEO.
A year later, [redacted] proposed a deal to link "Flip Video" cameras to Google Videos in the hopes of competing with Youtube's exponential video production. That gambit was squelched by his boss.
Love this.
Another thing: Jeff Huber thought that having 2.5 Google engineers would be enough to outcompete YouTube at the time. Given that they eventually acquired YouTube for over $1B, was that essentially paying for their ~2 best engineers?