After last week’s exploration of the first computer programme written by Ada Lovelace in 1843, this week we have jumped ahead more than 175 years in time to highlight the digital platform of YouTube.
MPEG, which is the acronym for Moving Picture Experts Group, are images that are compressed for transmission.
Broadcasting companies use three different kilobits per second speeds. There is a 56 kilobits per second (Kbps), 200 Kbps or 500 Kbps speed and they all have their uses. MPEG compression allows you to pick the bit rate when encoding a moving pictures – or video as we know it. If you think of the programmes you watch, an action film or sporting event requires a much higher bit rate to capture all the images and if you are watching a movie that has the characters more sedentary, you don’t need the same type of bit compression.
Speaking of video ….. According to Internet rankings, YouTube is the second most-visited website after Google Search and the scope of this platform is mind boggling!! As of May 2019, there were more than 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube each minute and one billion hours of content watched on YouTube every day.
More of the population’s younger demographic will likely never have cable and will stream news and shows over YouTube instead.
In our month end chapter to women in tech, we salute the CEO of YouTube Susan Wojcicki. As one of the original founders of Google, she become their first marketing manager in 1999. While leading the online advertising business, she was put in charge of Google’s first video department and while there realized how successful the small start up called YouTube was doing in the marketplace. She put forward a proposal to her team at Google that they buy YouTube and has been their CEO since 2014.
Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard University and, after graduating with honors, went into the technical space after bypassing her original plans to get a graduate degree in economics. With two masters degrees and named one of time’s 100 most influential people in 2015, Ms. Wojcicki is more than the CEO of this highly successful video platform.
She is a strong advocate in doing away with gender discrimination at technology companies and has led the charge in helping foster girls education in computer science pushing to make coding main stream in school systems today.
In the month of March, we have highlighted four past and present strong wonderful women who have changed the shape of the technological world that we live in. As a woman in technology for the last two decades, I know some of the challenges and obstacles that they would have been through but, on a personal note, it can be a highly rewarding path to pursue.
I hope that whatever your interest is in the making of our technical world, you find your way filled with new information that allows you to make educated decisions about how you wish to engage with tech. It impacts all our lives and it is important to understand the what and why around that.
Next week in our blog and podcast we will be looking at the past weeks discussions and how they weave into the world we live in today.
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