The creator of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen, is a lifelong puzzle master. His story is important to consider because it personifies the do-it-yourself ethos that has brought the online video revolution to life. The people behind this are self-taught, self-motivated, and filling a need that the corporate world can only vie to catch up with. Cohen began coding by seeing how fast he could crash the Timex Sinclair computer that his dad, a bioinformatics professor, brought home in the early 1980s. He programmed his own Connect Four game and competed in geek contests called Code Wars. But he lasted only two years as a computer science student at State University of New York in Buffalo before dropping out. "You don't need a certificate to be a programmer," he says, "you just go and do it."

Following the siren call of San Francisco's emerging cypherpunk scene, a subculture of privacy-conscious cryptography coders, Cohen headed west. By the time file-sharing programs like Napster and Gnutella hit the Net, Cohen had enough Skinny Puppy CDs that he didn't feel the need to pirate online. Plus, he didn't think the programs were very well written. Surfers could trade files with each other only one at a time. As if it were a new Rubik's puzzle, he committed himself to solving this faster. The solution was to break up the files so that numerous surfers could essentially upload and download them simultaneously. In geek-speak, this is called swarming. And it didn't take long for people to swarm BitTorrent.

When geeks deluged BitTorrent to swap new Linux software in early 2003, it went prime time. As one fan blogged, "Woohoo! BitTorrent rocks!" While Cohen was busy with his code, he never considered how it would be used. Gary Lerhaupt, a computer science master's student at Stanford, has embraced it as a new business model. His start-up, Prodigem, helps artists convert their music and films into BitTorrent files and, using fingerprinting technology, get paid for downloads. "This is a free culture movement that's empowering people," he says, "You can make money by giving people open access to your media. I don't think Hollywood realizes that yet."

But Hollywood is trying. The watershed moment for Me TV came on 12 October 2005, when Apple announced that the fifth-generation iPod, the company's ubiquitous digital music player, would support video too. Though the screen was small (2.5 inches diagonally) and the resolution shoddy (480 by 480, with a maximum pixel count of 230 400), the sheer giddy mobility of the platform was the stuff of a revolution. Video could be everywhere.

And it was. Along with news of the video iPod, Apple delivered the second punch, a revamped version of its popular iTunes digital download service. In addition to sucking down songs and audiobooks, consumers would now be able to choose from over 2000 music videos and short films. The biggest wave came from Disney, which reported that episodes of ABC television shows, including the hits "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives," would be available for download at the cost of US $1.99 per episode. "For the first time ever, hit prime-time shows can be purchased online the day after they air on TV," said Robert Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company. Now instead of BitTorrenting your favorite TV show, you could pay for it!

But the dawn of the video iPod sent waves, of course, back through the underground too. And concurrent with the rise of the mobile video platform came another movement: the dawn of the home brewers. Homebrew video makers have taken to the Net in droves, uploading their own content for free download. Lowcost digital cameras and newfangled distribution outlets have spurred the phenomenon. Vidblogs (http://www.vidblogs.com/), and Vlog Map (http://www.vlogmap.org/) are two of the sites dedicated to the scene. Soldiers chronicle the war from Iraq. Nerds vlog from the Tokyo Game Show.

While video blogs, vlogs, or whatever you want to call them, are all the rage, they're not new. In 2000, "vog" pioneer Adrian Miles posted what's become a manifesto: "A vog respects bandwidth," he declares, "A vog is not streaming video (this is not the reinvention of television). A vog uses performative video and/or audio. A vog is personal. A vog uses available technology. A vog experiments with writerly video and audio. A vog lies between writing and the televisual. A vog explores the proximate distance of words and moving media. A vog is Jean-Luc Godard with a Mac and a modem. A vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog."

Vloggers have taken the manifesto to heart. Consider "It's Jerrytime!" (http://www.itsjerrytime.com/), a cult hit vlog that epitomizes what people's video is all about. The homemade series chronicles the hapless life of Jerry, an ordinary schlub contending with the trials of everyday life. Jerry, the star, writes the stories and does the music. His brother, Orrin, animates the entries with just a digital camera, Adobe After Effects, and clip art.

The effect is something like Harvey Pekar meets Hunter S. Thompson, a hallucinogenic take on the Sisyphean trials of everyday life. Each episode is rendered in a kind of skewed photorealism, where real pictures of Jerry are cut up and rearranged in something of a knock-off "South Park" style. In one, Jerry endures the wrath of his mush-mouthed landlord, who breaks into his apartment but refuses to fix a broken fridge or leaky pipe. In another, Jerry takes a job driving a billboard truck, only to crash it through a drive-through teller. Who needs Pixar when you have a dude like this?

And such tricks aren't only for Adobe masters. A copy of the old computer game Quake can also do the trick for wannabe animators. Since the ultraviolent first-person shooter was released 10 years ago, a subculture has flourished around so-called Machinima: computer-generated films made with game programs like id Software's Quake and Epic's Unreal. Much as they would make a computer game modification, Machinima directors put all their action into the game world, adding characters, graphics, sound, and dialogue. The result is kind of like having your computer game taken over by an NYU film student, from the Groove Tube riffs of Blahbalicious to the rough-and-tumble Gang Wars. It's all there for the taking at the main hub, Machinima.com.

Barebones vlogging is even easier to tackle. All you need is a digital camera and a program such as Movie Maker, which comes with Windows, or iMovie for Macs. The site Our Media (http://www.ourmedia.org/), a service provided by the Internet Archive, hosts anyone's media, from videos to photos, at no cost. Another free alternative is Blip TV (http://www.blip.tv/). Not surprisingly, pay-to-play services are moving in for the kill. Typepad (http://www.typepad.com/), Vimeo (http://www.vimeo.com/), and Blogware (http://www.blogware.com/) offer hosting for a fee.

What's next for Me TV? Cold, hard e-cash. Now that BitTorrent and vlogging have brought video power to the people, the next phase of online video is monetization. Google and Yahoo have entered the game, allowing people to search, download, and share videos. And a start-up called Blinkx.tv (http://www.blinkx.tv/) is refining its own video search tool, which trolls thousands of hours of video, from TV to vloggers.

A new generation is growing up with video at its fingertips. And the old generation is getting in tune. My friend Mike now has his own videos on the Web. They're short films of his 4-year-old son dressed up like a pirate and enacting homemade plays. The "Wish I Had a Cat" video, alas, is still missing in action. But stay tuned. If it ever surfaces, you'll find it online.