YouTube and Me

IF YOU miss out on a good TV program because of a brown-out, no need to fret. There’s always YouTube to the rescue. I’ve always been a fan of this website which was created in February 2005 by three enterprising young fellows in the US, namely Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.

To know more about the background of this company which grew by leaps and bounds, search for Preview of the Charlie Rose interview of YouTube CEO Chad Hurley and CTO Steve Chen in this site. You will find that their answers make a lot of business sense. In order to succeed in business, the bottomline is public service. Find out what people need and then try to meet that need.

In the case of YouTube, people are given the opportunity to be creative, to show their talents to the world, to be discovered and ultimately rise from poverty. Just look how Justin Bieber who admittedly grew up below the poverty line became an international celebrity through YouTube. Then, there are a lot of fresh talents out there just waiting to be given a lucky break, just like Justin.

An interesting point raised by Mr Hurley during the said interview is that the YouTube exercise is intended to drive people back to the best experience which is TV and the movie theater. I agree with him completely because this is what I recently experienced. Now where do I begin to tell the story…

It was in the early 1970s and I was in my childhood years. I remember that I often went to my parents’ bedroom in our old house to play a vinyl record of the song “Where do I begin” on a red portable radio phonograph. The song left a great imprint on my mind.

If there’s a song that could capture the greatness of love, then for me it would be this song with lyrics by Carl Sigman.

Thanks to ASHQEEN291, a YouTube user, I was able to pinpoint Howard Andrew Williams as the singer of this song from my childhood. The best YouTube video of Andy Williams singing this song that I watched was uploaded by BurtMurdoch, another user of YouTube. And as what Mr. Hurley intended I became interested to the point of obsession in the movie “Love Story” which has “Where do I begin” for its theme song. Film score composer was Francis Lai.

“Love Story” is the movie with the famous line “love means never having to say you’re sorry”. YouTube users have uploaded lots of movie clips which tell the poignant story of a lawyer who lost his young wife to cancer. The stars of the movie were Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw. Haunting how in real life, O’Neal’s domestic partner Farrah Fawcett recently passed away from cancer.

So what happens when one is left behind by the demise of a loved one? How does one cope with feelings of great loss and loneliness? This is the question posed by the movie “Love Story” which was directed by Arthur Hiller and written by Erich Segal.