YouTube Essay -- Technology, Video, Copyrights

Broadcast Yourself YouTube is an online form of entertainment. While some viewers do not appreciate its format, others enjoy watching and creating videos on YouTube. YouTube videos range from being educational, instructional, comedic to amusing. Creating videos to upload to YouTube is being done by people of all ages from all over the world. According to author Alex K. Rich, â€Å"thirty-eight percent of Americans want to distribute content online.†(Rich 1) YouTube has brought about a new form of high quality amusement and entertainment to a lot of its viewers. YouTube â€Å"is a popular video streaming website that displays uploaded video files created or disseminated by its users† (Belanger 1) writes Craig Belanger in his overview of YouTube. It is free and user friendly which makes it very popular. According to Jennifer Sexton this innovative website was founded by three former PayPal employees who had a â€Å"simple desire to capture short videos and share them with others.† (Sexton 1) While their intentions were not to make money and become a popular website, very quickly YouTube’s popularity increased and it is used by many internet users. According to the viewpoint of Alex K. Rich, â€Å"YouTube has lowered the bar for what is considered entertainment†(Rich 1) It is true that a majority of the videos created and uploaded to YouTube are not professional quality, it is a website that allows submitters of all ages and degrees of creativity to make a video. For example, the Lonelygirl15 videos were â€Å"sho t on a $150 web camera and showed that digital videos could be made by anyone.† (Hirschorn 3) The motto of YouTube is â€Å"Broadcast Yourself.† Michael Hirschorn wrote in his article, â€Å"Thank You, YouTube†, that the â€Å"start of low cost videos and its... ...s become part of the culture of the internet and influences things going on in the world today. As a viewer, people become of what is accepted and what is deemed not worth watching. In â€Å"YouTube: Guide to Critical Analysis†, some of the â€Å"videos that YouTube viewers have watched are 1) Soon after YouTube’s launch, clips from the 2006 Winter Olympics were posted, 2) Pop band OK Go won a 2006 Grammy award for a video that had originally achieved notoriety on YouTube and 3) excerpts from â€Å"The Daily Show with Jon Stewart† were regularly featured on YouTube.† (YouTube: Guide to Critical Analysis 2) So, as long as YouTube exists, while some of the videos will be done by professionals wanting to promote their product, there will always be the submitter who wants to â€Å"broadcast themselves† and upload it, even if it is using their cell phone and the use of their internet.