15 Years Ago Today, the First Video Was Uploaded to YouTube

As it says in the title to this blog post, the first video was uploaded to YouTube 15 years ago today, April 23, 2005 at 8:31pm Pacific time. It was called Me at the zoo and was uploaded by Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of YouTube (along with Steve Chen and Chad Hurley). This video even has it's own Wikipedia page: Me at the zoo. And you can still watch it (18 seconds):

Well, if you watched it, it is right up there in terms of interest with Thomas Edison reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb in the first phonograph recording. If the 20th century was defined by audio, the 21st century is defined by video. YouTube was not the first video service. In fact, Google Video was launched a few months earlier in 2005. But somehow YouTube made everything easier. In that era, there were lots of incompatible video standards and so making a video-sharing site required more than just uploading the video files and letting people download them. That would run into trouble since any given video player would only support a few of the many standards. So YouTube translated them and made them all available through Adobe Flash. In that era, everybody had Adobe Flash on their computer (this was the pre-smartphone era—nobody was watching video on their phones yet).

As I'm sure you know, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65B in October 2006, just a year-and-a-half since that first video upload. At the time, YouTube didn't have any way to monetize videos and their bandwidth costs were reportedly huge. My son worked there for a year, and started up and ran their partner program, letting people put advertising on their home page. This was long before actual video ads on YouTube videos. One 14-year old called "Fred" produced videos in a squeaky voice that my son hated, but he became YouTube's first video millionaire, the first person paid over $1M by YouTube. Apparently some video-game company tried to buy out the advertising on his home page for a month for what they thought was an outrageous amount of money, but he turned them down since he made more than that per month already. Looking him up, I see he has his own Wikipedia page and his name was actually Lucas Cruikshank. Now they can start even younger. The youngest YouTube star, Ryan ToysReview who was six years old in 2017, made $11M that year according to Forbes. He was the highest paid YouTuber in 2018 and 2019 (both years over $20M).

All Sensor Data Is Video

One thing Chris Rowen has pointed out regularly is that to a first approximation, today all sensor data is video. Chris was the founder of Tensilica, was CTO of the IP division at Cadence after we acquired the company, and today is the CEO of Babblelabs. The charts below show what Chris meant. On the left is a breakdown of the different types of sensors by the number in use. On the right is the amount of data generated by those sensors. In both graphs, video is red, and highlighted with a black frame. Other sensors are other colors. But in the chart on the right, all those other colors together don't generate enough data not to peek out from behind the black frame:

One of the biggest areas of both opportunity and investment today is the "drive" to autonomous vehicles. There is other data, but autonomous driving is mostly about processing video data (I include radar and lidar, it is similar enough).

But the king of video is YouTube. The statistics are mind-boggling. Every minute, 300 hours of video are uploaded. Five billion videos are watched per day by its 1.3B users. Those are numbers from late last year, and with the current work-from-home regime, I'll bet viewing is up even more.

Sunday Brunch

I make a video every week, too. I used to try and give a preview of the upcoming week on Breakfast Bytes called What's for Breakfast? but that turned out to be logistically too complicated. Sometimes I would be writing about an embargoed product announcement, sometimes I had to juggle the posts around for some reason, and generally, it was unsatisfactory. So now I do a video version of Sunday Brunch. In just the same way as the email (which you can sign up for either here or at the end of every Breakfast Bytes blog post), I give a brief overview of the five posts from the week before, and also highlight one post from one of the other Cadence blogs. I try and find interesting places to make the videos depending on my travel...but right now you get either my living room or my balcony!

We don't have any special way for you to sign up to get just this weekly video, but you can subscribe to the Cadence YouTube channel where they appear. Here is a recent example:

Learn More

As if to emphasize the point that everything is video today, it has been less than a week since I last wrote about video. Last Friday, I wrote about SLAM and the SLAM library for the Tensilica Vision Q7 in a post It's a SLAM Dunk Programming the Vision Q7 DSP. SLAM is another example of complex video processing, allowing a device to locate itself accurately and build up a detailed map of the surroundings automatically. I'll leave you to look at last Friday's post to find out more.

The Spectator's 10,000th Issue

A rather older technology has an anniversary today, too. The Spectator, a magazine based in London, is published on Thursdays these days (UK time, so in the US I can read it on Wednesday evenings). Today is its 10,000th issue. It is the longest running magazine around. I've been a subscriber for years. No, not since it started publication. That was 192 years ago in 1828, at the end of what is known as the Georgian era (1714-1837 when the kings were George I, II, III, and IV). The Duke of Wellington was prime minister (and there have been 54 more since then).

And I thought Breakfast Bytes was doing well to be at well over 1,000 posts!

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