Datasheet

After you view a couple videos, you can get adventurous and click one of the
blue buttons (actually the buttons are a gradient from white to a lovely shade
of blue) and gain access to all the videos in the YouTube vault. You can browse
the Videos section of the site, check out videos in the Categories section of
the site, reach for your remote in the Channels section of the site, or smile on
your brother in the Community section of the site. No matter where you go in
the vast YouTube universe, you get to watch an animated ad on the right side
of the site. After all, someone’s got to pay for the terabytes of bandwidth that
YouTube consumes every month. Here’s a question to ponder: If YouTube
removed half the videos and advertisements from their vast Web site, would
it be half-vast?
YouTube invites you to upload videos on every page of the site. If you’re a
registered user and click the Upload Video button, you can upload a video —
a task that we simplify in Chapter 7. However, if you don’t have a YouTube
account and click the button, you’re presented with a simple form to fill out,
which makes you an official Tuber. After you’re an official Tuber, you get to
enjoy all the benefits of the YouTube Web site and become a part of the
YouTube community. After you sign in, the site welcomes you with your
username and statistics, as shown in Figure 1-3.
Tubers get to upload videos as often as they want, and the price is zip, zilch,
nada. Tubers who like videos provided by a specific user can subscribe to
that user’s channel. Subscribing to a channel is as simple as clicking a button.
When you subscribe to a channel, an icon of the channel appears on your
Subscriptions list, which is part of your Channel. Click the Channel icon — the
Plus signs
Figure 1-2:
YouTube
welcomes
you with
featured
videos.
12
Part I: Curtain Up on Streaming Video
05_149256 ch01.qxp 6/22/07 10:04 PM Page 12