Jack Boulware

This one focuses almost exclusively on the legendary “Bus Uncle” video.

On an evening in late April of this year, a KMB (Kowloon Motor Bus) was driving along route 68X in the direction of Hong Kong’s Yuen Long district. Real estate agent Elvis Ho Yui Hei shifted in his seat. He was trapped in a situation familiar to all of us, sitting one row behind an older man talking very loudly on a cell phone. The 23-year-old Ho tapped the gentlemen on the shoulder, called him the respectful term “Uncle,” and asked him to please speak more softly. And that’s how it all began.

The older man suddenly leaned over his seat and shouted at Ho, unleashing a stream of verbal abuse, both harrowing and hilarious. For six long minutes the quarrel continued, Ho mostly silent, as the older man ranted on, demanding an apology, explaining how his life is very stressful, and spewing profanities about Ho’s mother.

We’ve all witnessed these moments, a rare window of real life that you might see and tell your friends. Another little anecdote from the daily pageant of humans trying to share space on the planet. However, this particular moment was recorded on video, by a resourceful accountant/student named Jon Fong Wing Hang, who was sitting across the aisle from Ho, with a cell phone camera.

The video segment was uploaded to a Hong Kong internet forum, and quickly reposted to YouTube, an online repository of digital videos based in California. Within a month, the segment, known as “Bus Uncle,” became one of YouTube’s most popular clips. A slice of real life on a bus, seen and enjoyed by millions of viewers.

Helpful fans translated the argument from Cantonese, and provided Chinese and English subtitles. Catchphrases such as “I have pressure. You have pressure. Why did you provoke me?” circulated throughout Hong Kong culture, and were even printed on T-shirts. News agencies around the world ran stories about “Bus Uncle,” and sent reporters trying to identify the man. Cultural commentators debated whether the video clip represented the emotional state of Hong Kong citizens, and the pressure of living in such a densely populated society.

As of this writing, nearly 4 million people have watched the “Bus Uncle” video on YouTube. What began as a simple weird altercation on a Hong Kong bus has turned into a worldwide phenomenon. And all because of a small company in San Mateo, California, in an office above a pizza parlor.

——————————————————

Conceived at a San Francisco dinner party in early 2005 by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the idea was originally a website that allowed people to post short homemade videos and share them with anyone. Some of the first YouTube videos ever posted were of Chen and his cat, PJ.

A beta version of the site debuted in May 2005, and it officially launched in December. Investors quickly seized the opportunity, and $11.5 million later, YouTube now hums with 50 employees. Each day, over 60,000 new videos are added.

According to the information services company Alexa, YouTube is already the 18th most popular site on the Internet. As of July 2006, an astonishing 100 million people visit YouTube, every single day.

Placing a video on YouTube is easy. A user signs up for a membership and submits a clip, which is approved by YouTube staff and then added to the site. Viewers rate the clip, and software keeps track of the total viewings and rankings by day, month, and of all time. Clip length is limited to ten minutes, but YouTube has recently added a Director’s Program, designed for filmmakers, comedians, and professional content producers, with no time limit.

So what’s there to watch? If you haven’t yet checked it out, be prepared for the strangest, most obscure, clandestine, nostalgic, trendy, or pointless video clips ever recorded by the human race. In addition to the classic “Bus Uncle,” you can find European music videos, Japanese anime, political news clips, soccer highlights, pet tricks, low-budget film parodies, amateur musicians, home vacation videos, and an inordinate amount of teenagers staring into a web camera and lipsynching a popular song. Adult-oriented clips are edited out, everything else is fair game. Links to these videos are emailed back and forth, or posted in blogs and websites.

Media critics have attributed the YouTube phenomenon in part to access to technology, a shortening attention span, as well as an increasing exhibitionism in our society. It also poses another problem for old media, who are accustomed to spending money to produce videos, and then recouping the investment by selling the content to viewers. Unlike cable or satellite television, YouTube is totally free to use.

In December 2005, a user posted a short Saturday Night Live film to the site. The rap parody was titled “Lazy Sunday,” and depicted the very non-gangster lives of two slackers eating cupcakes and going to see The Chronicles of Narnia movie. Traditional film and television studios were stunned to see its copyrighted work passed around the world, much further than the reach of Saturday Night Live itself. In one sense, it made the show relevant again to a younger audience. Unfortunately, all this exposure came without permission or payment.

Money couldn’t buy such successful viral advertising. Nevertheless, NBC promptly issued a cease and desist order, and demanded all its clips be removed from YouTube. At the same time, another division of the corporation, the programming executives, wanted to know how they could get involved. NBC has since struck a partnership with YouTube to air the network’s clips and previews on the website.

Visiting YouTube for a testdrive yields an unimaginable wealth of – well, I don’t really know what you’d call it. A LOT of video clips. I conducted a test of random searches, to see what’s in the archive. If you want to stump the system, you’ll have to try harder than me.

For example, a search for Homer Simpson’s favorite ‘70s rock band “Bachman Turner Overdrive” brings up five videos. Were there even five videos made of the band? There are 65 clips for “Donald Rumsfeld.” The “Brady Bunch” theme song – 10 clips. The 1960s Brazilian Tropicalia group “Os Mutantes” brings up 31. Taking a cue from YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, I search “cat tricks” and come up with 230. How about something nonsensical, like “monkey peanut butter”? Voila, two very good quality clips of monkeys eating peanut butter. And just for fun, searching “NBC,” YouTube’s newest financial backer, yields 1,560 videos.

Yet for all the excitement, it’s important to remember that online video is still a nascent media form. Picture quality is often grainy, and not appropriate for a big-screen monitor. There’s also the issue of profitability. YouTube has now begun to run advertising on the site, but it’s a long way to go before it generates enough revenue to be self-supporting.

And there’s the problem of being there first. Early online communities like Friendster and Napster captured the imagination some years ago, but users have moved on. Although the equivalent of one-third of the U.S. population visits YouTube every day, its competitors are already popping up. Internet giants Yahoo and Google are offering free videos, as well as a handful of start-ups like Revver, who offers users actual cash to clip contributors. As to how long YouTube maintains the dominant market share, who knows.

Which is all the more reason to visit YouTube now, in its raw untamed version, before its video selection is diluted by advertisers and sponsors. Here are three reasons why. You might call them the YouTube superstars. Like most personal video submissions, these contributors do it for the exposure and the attention, definitely not the money.

Until May 2006, Brooke Allison Brodack, aka “Brookers,” was working as a hostess at the 99 Restaurant in Holden, Massachusetts. After hours, she made quirky videos in her bedroom and posted them on YouTube. Response was so enormous she kept making more clips, most of them featuring her dancing to songs, making funny faces, or talking about her life. People began to post other clips inspired by “Brookers.” Viewers posted a fan website devoted to her, www.brookerfanatics.com.

And then Carson Daly Productions called. The talk show host was a huge admirer of Brodack’s clips, and sensed a market for her quirky creativity, outside of YouTube viewers. She ended up signing an 18-month development deal, and retired from the restaurant business.

Another popular contributor is Smosh, a T-shirt company in Carmichael, California run by Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox. The two young men posted a cheap video they made of each other lip-synching and play-fighting to audio from the Mortal Kombat game and film franchise. It’s completely stupid, but millions of viewers watched it anyway, and the Smosh boys quickly posted another clip of similar nonsense, set to the tune of the Pokemon theme song.

I don’t really get understand the appeal of Smosh videos, and you may not either, but clearly we just don’t get it, because in seven months, nearly 20 million people have willingly watched these two clips. The Pokemon video is the #2 most watched YouTube video of all time.

But the number one YouTube video in history, the Mount Olympus of homemade clips, is an unedited six-minute segment of a dancing man from the Midwest. Yes, that’s right, dancing. Inspirational comedian Judson Laipply appears often at schools and organizations, and as part of his routine, does a choreographed dance routine to popular songs by Elvis Presley, the Bee Gee, AC/DC, Eminem, and many others. This clip of a live performance, titled “The Evolution of Dance,” is consistently YouTube’s most-viewed video, and in just three months, nearly 30 million people have watched it.

Laipply was beseiged by news organizations from around the U.S. Despite the attention, he has never posted any other clips. He does say on his website www.lifeischange.com, that he’s working on a sequel.

But what became of “Bus Uncle”? The clip itself has spawned numerous versions and parodies. We can now hear the ranting bus passenger’s voice mixed with songs by Dr. Dre, Lindsey Lohan, and Hong Kong singer Sammi Cheng. Real-life re-enactments, animation — there are actually many more YouTube videos about “Bus Uncle” than the clip itself. If you haven’t seen the original, you’re totally lost.

After a month of highly important investigative work, hoping to unravel the mystery, reporters from a Hong Kong magazine finally tracked down the Bus Uncle, who is named Chan Yuet-tung. The 51-year-old lives by himself in an apartment with five cats, and until his YouTube appearance, his biggest claim to fame was running in three elections for Chief Executive of Hong Kong (he didn’t win, obviously). He doesn’t listen to radio or watch TV, and had no idea of his media stardom.

Hong Kong newspapers and television chewed on the “Bus Uncle” story for days. Chan appeared jovial on camera, and laughed off the incident, saying he doesn’t use foul language at all. In the wake of his brief fame, a restaurant hired him to do public relations. But not all citizens considered him a hero. Three men mugged him at work one day, and he ended up in the emergency room.

The amazing tale of Chan and his “Bus Uncle” triumph has now subsided. The videos are still all over YouTube, but the news cycle has passed. And yet in Hong Kong, the legend continues to this day. A current advertisement for a bottled water company features a re-enactment of the Bus Uncle incident, the most-watched episode in bus transit history.

(A version of this story first appeared in American Way magazine)