They are far from over. People cite YouTube HTML5 player without considering how vlogs are actually recorded, processed and uploaded through Flash. As the viewer, it's a nice luxury to say it can all be done through HTML5, but as a producer of content you'd have a different opinion.
Huh? How many vlogs are "actually recorded, processed and uploaded through Flash"?
I don't think many people, and certainly not many professional vlogers, use a Flash based vlog recording and processing solution. (Including both the Adobe Flash authoring environment/flv encoding tools AND any bizarro online flash vlog recording service which uses the computer's camera).
In YT's early days it was mostly people recording vlongs and responses from their webcam. YouTube. Get it? Certainly professional vloggers would rather use a nicely cut, professionally edited version. But that doesn't represent the majority of YT users. That bizarro world you talk about is the underpinnings of YT's critical mass.
1) People did produce vlogs and responses from their webcam. You got that right. But this has nothing to do with Flash, and it's ability to use the webcam on a flash app. People making vlogs with their webcam just used one of several commercial video apps to create them, not some flash page.
2) I seriously doubt vlogs were "the underpinnings of YT's critical mass". YT got popular because of its videos (of cats, songs, babes, funny stuff, etc), not because of video blogging or the NUMA guy.
> People did produce vlogs and responses from their webcam. You got that right. But this has nothing to do with Flash
It has everything to do with Flash. Flash was the only reliable way to record via webcam and have it instantly available. I say that it contributed to YT's critical mass because YT made it easy for anyone to record and upload. No crappy bundled webcam software could beat that. YT didn't need to explain it. No "if you have this webcam, use this software" or "open Quicktime and export as a .mpg, then..." BS. Record, hit stop, hit upload. Done.
> I seriously doubt vlogs were "the underpinnings of YT's critical mass". YT got popular because of its videos (of cats, songs, babes, funny stuff, etc)
You have to respect that YT is a community, one with a pretty significant voice. Type in "sopa", "war in iraq", or "arab spring" and see how many cat videos you get. Video sites were already around - a video site you could contribute your voice to - that's what made YT a success.
It has everything to do with Flash. Flash was the only reliable way to record via webcam and have it instantly available.
Citation needed. I don't know of ANY remotely popular flash vlog recording service of the time. Not to mention that vlogs in general never got that popular, period.
You have to respect that YT is a community, one with a pretty significant voice. Type in "sopa", "war in iraq", or "arab spring" and see how many cat videos you get.
YT is not a community at all. It has tens of millions of extremely diverse members. You can find any kind of shit in YT, from democratic, to republican, to anarchistic, to pro-nazi, to various nationalisms, to kittens, to porn, to full length movies, to ads, to high culture, to fart jokes, ... What part seems like a specific community with a voice to you? It's just the assemblage of millions of individual tastes and opinions.
The fact you can find things about sopa, war in iraq, arab spring etc does not mean anything of the sort of YT being a "community" with a "voice".
It's like finding emails and blog posts about such issues: of course you will, there are millions of bloggers, thousands of them are bound to write about the issues of the day.
Huh? How many vlogs are "actually recorded, processed and uploaded through Flash"?
I don't think many people, and certainly not many professional vlogers, use a Flash based vlog recording and processing solution. (Including both the Adobe Flash authoring environment/flv encoding tools AND any bizarro online flash vlog recording service which uses the computer's camera).