• mindbleach
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    4 months ago

    Different times. I’m not sure Kids These Days™ will ever know how hard it was to get downloaded video out into the world. Just showing it on a television was an ordeal.

    Apple released an iPod with a 60 GB hard disk and a color screen and it still didn’t play videos. Someone converted the new Episode III trailer into an MP3 and a slideslide of four thousand JPGs, and scrolled through it at about the right speed, and it was jawdropping. I watched their camcorder video of that event as a downloaded .MOV file - Apple’s own video format, at least a decade old, then a de-facto standard online - because Youtube did not exist. A few short years later the Wii got a Youtube channel and it was the coolest fucking thing to watch random internet videos, ten minutes at a time, on a television three feet thick.

    But nowadays? Everything’s an LCD, everything’s USB-C or HDMI, everything has wi-fi even if it shouldn’t. Watch the spooky murder video on your smartphone, you maniac.