Six years ago, if you wanted to show the video of your kid’s first day of preschool to your friends and family, chances are, you plugged your camcorder into the television set, fiddled with channels and inputs, and eventually got it working. If you had family far away or were just technologically inclined, you might have loaded the video onto your computer and burned a DVD to pop in the mail. Not so anymore. Today, everyone just uploads their videos to YouTube. This month, the service we all rely on turns six years old.
These days, everyone uploads their cat videos, their kids’ piano recitals, even the Pledge of Allegiance to YouTube to share with friends and family and, quite possibly, the entire world. There are video cameras designed to work specifically with YouTube and even mobile phones that can record video offer the option of uploading directly to YouTube.
There are lots of excellent videos available, from scientific lectures and debates to guitar lessons and dance classes. You can see footage of important moments in history and history in the making. The site serves up more than three billion videos a day and 48 hours of video is uploaded every minute. Yes, two days’ of footage every 60 seconds. That’s a lot of video.
To celebrate, in the best YouTube fashion, here’s a video of a baby laughing hysterically at a spoon. Enjoy, and post links to your or your favorite videos in the comments!
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