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YouTube的兴起
The Birth of Youtube
关键词汇：
Piracy: n. 盗版
BBS: 论坛
Interactive television: 互动电视
MIDI: 数码音乐
P2P: 对等网络
Streaming media: 流媒体
Synchronous: 同步的
Webcasting: 网络广播
原文：
Remember when actor Crispin Glover went nutso on late-night television and came inches short of karate-kicking David Letterman in the jaw? Or that famous roast of insult comedian Don Rickles on the Dean Martin Show back in the 70s? If you happened to miss either of those crucial moments in pop cultural history, fear not. They live today on the Web site YouTube.
In just six-months time, YouTube has boomed from a startup viral video site to a Web phenomenon - a virtual library of cultural highlights and amateur video clips uploaded by anybody with a digital camcorder and some time to burn, 50,000 of them a day at last word.
Visitors watch 50 million clips per day. Not bad for a company with 30 employees and an office over a pizza parlor. In certain respects, YouTube does for video what Napster did for audio, and some people predict, its only a matter of time before, like Napster, it gets shut down.
CONAN: And for those of us who don’t know or, in my case, didn’t know till yesterday, how does YouTube work?
Mr. GOETZ: Well, so YouTube is all built on the basis of user-generated content. It is - you, in your intro, you had a nice description of television. It used to be if you aren’t there at the exact time when something happened, you miss it. It was all top-down broadcasting. The networks, the channels dictate when you see what. What YouTube reflects is the democratization of content, of video content. So it’s whatever you want to watch, whenever you want to watch, and it’s produced all by the users. So it’s a kind of cacophony and a mess, but its the new future of video.
CONAN: Well, you say produced by the users. In some respects, those are people who take a clip off of David Letterman and that’s their content, and then they upload it to YouTube.
Mr. GOETZ: Well, that’s certainly part of it. I mean, you know, right now YouTube’s rules allow it’s all based on the user saying that there’s, that they own the copyright. And so it’s up to the copyright owners to police YouTube and notify the company if there’s anything that’s, that they own or they want off. And then YouTube will summarily take it off. That’s how Lazy Sunday, the Saturday Night Live clip, that kind of shot YouTube to kind of a massive audience right off the bat, right after they official launched in December.
NBC let it sit on there. In fact, there’s some speculation that people in the marketing department of NBC put it on there. A few weeks later, the lawyers at NBC went to YouTube and said take it off. So the copyright issues are definitely there, but that’s only part of what YouTube is all about. It’s also this huge, mass audience of, well, they’re not just watchers, they’re also creators. And they’re making the content there from, you know, stupid little clips of their dog barking or wearing a funny dress to, actually, almost professional quality news or entertainment productions.
CONAN: And you suggested that Lazy Sunday segment from Saturday Night Live, one of their advertisements, I guess, or fake advertisements, but there were the marketing department wanted it. The legal department didn’t. There was another example of a clip produced by a company in Britain to promote The Simpson’s. They used live actors to do that famous opening segment of The Simpson’s. And they put it up deliberately to create buzz, and it worked.
Mr. GOETZ: Yeah, no. Its all, you know, its viral media, and its a great way, if you have something that catches peoples attention, it’s a great way to just catapult yourself into kind of massive audience and popularity. On the other hand, there are 50,000 video clips being uploaded onto YouTube a day, and, you know, a tiny, tiny fraction of those are actually watched by any more than kind of the guys friends and family. So, you know, its all kind of a open field for the cream rising to the top.
