YouTube的兴起
The Birth of Youtube
关键词汇：
Piracy: n. 盗版
BBS:
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
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.
翻译：
还记得克里斯平-格洛弗（美国男影星）在晚间电视节目中差一点使用空手道的踢法袭击大卫莱特曼的下巴吗？还有70年代时喜剧演员唐.里克莱斯在迪恩马丁节目中著名的爆粗口事件吗？如果您错过了那些在流行文化的历史中重要的时刻，不要担心，您还能在YouTube上找到。
在仅仅六个月的时间内，YouTube已经从一个刚刚起步的小型视频网站演变成互联网上的新现象：它成为了一个虚拟的图书馆，包含文化上的热点事件和业余爱好者用便携式数字摄像机拍摄的每天达到五万个的视频片段。
网民每天在YouTube上浏览的视频次数达到了5000万个。对于一个只有30名员工和办公室设在一家披萨店内上的公司来说是个不错的成绩了。在某些方面来说，YouTube就是视频界的Napster。有些人预测，YouTube最终也逃脱不了被关闭的命运。
问题：对于那些不了解YouTube是怎么一回事的人，就像我到才刚刚了解.........
回答：YouTube靠的是使用者提供的节目。在本节的介绍词里对电视有了一个很好的概括。电视曾今是在特定的时间放特定的节目。如果你没有时间看的话，你就可能永远错过了。电视网络是自上而下的播出，频道决定你收看什么节目。而YouTube代表的是电视节目的民主化。你能在随时随地观看任何节目，而这些节目都是由使用者们制作的。这看上去就像一团嘈杂的（声音？），但是这就是视频的未来。
问题：你说由使用者制作的。但是在有些情况下，人们仅仅简单地截取了大卫莱特曼节目的一个片段并上传到YouTube？
回答：YouTube规定只要使用者声明拥有该视频的版权就可以了。所以监督YouTube问题由版权拥有者来定。如果版权拥有者期望将其中哪个视频撤下时，他们会告知公司，我们就会迅速地删除该视频。那就是为什么我们能在《懒人周日》(周六夜现场的一个片段)刚刚开播后就大量在YouTube上转播的原因了。NBC同意了它的播出。其实有人猜测这是NBC市场部的一个策略。几周后，NBC的律师告诉我们NBC希望撤下这些节目。所以这肯定涉及了版权问题了。但是YouTube的魅力并不仅仅就是这些。观众不仅仅是看客，更是节目的创造者。他们也自己拍摄一些可笑的视频，如宠物狗吼叫，穿上滑稽的衣服等等，质量几乎达到新闻或娱乐片的专业制作水平了。
问题：你刚才说《懒人周日》节目在YouTube上的播出起到了广告的作用，或者是虚假广告的作用，NBC的市场部同意这样的做法，而法律部门却不同意？同样一个例子是英国的一家公司对《辛普森家族》的推广，他们使用了真人来做片子的开头并把这段开头主动上传到了YouTube来吸引眼球，而确实起到了作用。
回答：哦，这就是我们所说的病毒性媒体。如果你有什么能吸引人眼球的东西，那你就能一下子获得巨大的观众群并迅速成名。但是另外一方面，每天就有约5万个视频被上传到YouTube，而且上传者的朋友和家人实际上观看到的只是很小的一部分，所以这是一个精英展露才华出人头地的地方。
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