A heavy metal riff roars over black and white footage of grimy industrial equipment that whines over the chugging guitars. It’s another clip on the Hydraulic Press Channel, a wildly successful YouTube account that traffics in videos of stuff, well, getting crushed by a hydraulic press. It’s hard to look away. The press—which uses a piston to exert extreme force on a small area—mashed a Nokia 3310 like an old banana. It splintered a bowling pin like a handful of matchsticks, and later in the same clip shattered a bowling ball like a frozen snack. It crushed a Lego figurine’s head into a grotesque sheet like the antagonist in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, pulped a Barbie doll into something like a John Carpenter prop, and flattened an old-fashioned alarm clock into what looked unsettlingly like a two-dimensional painting of itself. Those clips and others on the Hydraulic Press Channel have turned into runaway internet hits in recent months, often climbing to the front page of Reddit and racking up millions of views and 500,000 subscribers.

The personality behind them, it turns out, is Lauri Vuohensilta, a 29-year-old student and competitive powerlifter from Tampere, Finland. Vuohensilta let me ask him a few questions, though his answers were so brusque that I felt as though he’d compressed them in the hydraulic press as well. cuisinart 56 oz poweredge blenderHe did share a few tantalizing details: He films the videos using a press in his family’s workshop that they normally use to bend and straighten things, or to install bearings; hamilton beach 59765 hand blenderhe was surprised by his channel’s sudden viral success; oster 450 watt blender costcohe takes requests for new things to crush, but otherwise tends to squash stuff that he just happens “to have laying around.”tribest personal blender 220v

It’s tempting to see Vuohelsilta’s videos as an answer to some fundamental drive to witness destruction—the same psychological force, perhaps, that drives children to demolish ant hills, or motorists to slow down when they pass a grisly wreck.breville hand blender and chopper 500w When I asked Vuohelsilta why he liked to crush things, though, his answer was oddly tautological. breville bbl605xl hemisphere control blender warrantyVerbatim, he wrote: “I likebto crush things just for fun and I am also quite curios to see what happens to diffrent things under the press.”kitchenaid mixer repair bellingham wa He did reveal that his hydraulic press videos are inspired by two other YouTube sensations that fixated on playful destruction: the “Will It Blend” series, in which Blendtec founder Tom Dickson used his company’s line of blenders to mulch everything from a Nike Air Max 90 sneaker to an iPad—a clip that attracted some 18 million views—and the “Red Hot Nickel Ball” clips

, which showed a glowing-hot ball of nickel melt its way through objects including a block of Velveeta, a Rubik’s cube and a novelty-sized gummy bear. (The most popular red hot nickel ball clip, strangely, shows the ball melting through floral foam, which drew nearly 16 million views.) Motherboard contributor Rachel Pick interviewed Matthew Neuland, who creates the red hot nickel ball videos, last year. “It’s probably strictly just curiosity, you know, ‘what will happen?” “That’s where you get your satisfaction from, actually seeing it done. And if it does something you weren’t expecting, that’s pretty cool.” The moderator of a subreddit dedicated to Vuohensilta’s videos, who goes by the handle Azonata, waxed philosophical about the implications of viral destruction. “People want to their hands dirty again, and, failing to do that, love to see other people getting their hands dirty,” he said. “Seeing a huge chunk of metal flatten every day items seems like a way to demystify them, breaking every known property and exposing what's inside.”

Though Vuohensilta was curt with my questions, his videos suggest a dry sense of humor. In perhaps his most ambitious one to date, which has about a million and a half views, he placed a smaller hydraulic press inside the larger hydraulic press. “I think that we must go deeper,” he said, before placing an even smaller hand operated press inside that one, and then a tiny plastic one, the size of a pencil eraser, inside that—a feat he called "pressception." Then he crushed the presses, one by one, starting with the smallest, as an epic soundtrack played in the background. Afterward, as he surveyed the twisted chunks of metal that remained, he chuckled. “I think that’s all for today,” he said, with a heavy accent. “Thank you for watching, and have a nice day.”When CEO Tom Dickson first fired up his low-cost camera to record what happens when you throw a wooden rake handle, among other things, into one of his Blendtec blenders, he had no idea that within days he'd be an Internet superstar.

, viewers have watched these extreme experiments more than 75 million times. His blenders are the ones whirring at Starbucks, but Will It Blend? is what juiced online retail sales more than 500% in the last year. I can't promise you the same kind of results—Dickson's a funny guy and blending an iPhone or a Chuck Norris action figure is catnip for Web-video addicts. But you don't need a shtick to use video successfully, just a story. The future of Web video extends beyond funny shorts to include live broadcasting as well as interactive apps. The rapid proliferation of video tools reveals several trends that enterprising businesses should learn to exploit in addition to using YouTube, still the big kahuna of the field. Everything discussed below is free to use, although many of these services are in alpha or beta mode and may require an invitation or company approval before experimenting. Streaming video: Build your own live TV network whenever you need one. There are a ton of tools that let you do this;

my current favorite, Mogulus, supports multiple cameras, graphics, and even recorded video if you aren't broadcasting live. (Others to consider are Qik, blogTV, and Kyte.) What would you do with your own network? I used it to report live from the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Companies should have been shooting the action in their booths, so employees or fans of the firm could vicariously share in the excitement. Cell-phone video: I shot my CES experience using my Nokia N95 phone ($550-$800). Imagine you want to talk to your sales force while meeting with a customer. Or you see a new competitive product for the first time while traveling. You turn on your new cell phone, start up one of the streaming services, and you're live. The team on the other end can chat with you while you're filming and direct you to show what it needs to see. Not enough cell phones can stream video yet. For example, the first iPhone can't do it. Global video: Even if you, like me, speak only English, you can reach customers in, say, Japan, Germany, or Russia using an amazing tool called dotSub.

It will add captions to your videos, which can then be translated into dozens of languages. Tech conference used dotSub for its live Web video. Email video: What's the worst part of email? Wondering if the sender is being sarcastic or not. Eyejot brings the eye roll and every other face-to-face nuance to personalized video emails. If your business is on Facebook, it offers a similar service. , and your mind will race with possibilities. With Asterpix, you can add clickable hot spots to clips. Click on one and open another video or a Web page. This is really great stuff for building how-to videos, because viewers can get the basics in one video or go deep for more detail. I also like how Asterpix lets you display new information next to the video while it runs on your Web site. No matter which services you choose, the most important point is simply to use video. Too many companies don't have clips showing their products, their philosophies, or simple news announcements by their CEOs.