YouTube is a video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. The service was created by three formerPayPal employees in February 2005. In November 2006, it was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion.[4] YouTube now operates as a Google subsidiary.[5] The site allows users to upload, view, and share videos, and it makes use ofAdobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video. Available content includes video clips, TV clips, music videos, and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.
Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS, the BBC,Vevo, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via YouTube, as part of the YouTube partnership program.[6] Unregistered users can watch videos, and registered users can upload videos to their channels. Videos considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old.
Contents
[show]Company history
Main article: History of YouTube
YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal.[7]Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer sciencetogether at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[8]
According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, but Chen commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible".[9]
Karim said the inspiration for YouTube first came from Janet Jackson's role in the 2004 Super Bowl incident, when her breast was exposed during her performance, and later from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Karim could not easily find video clips of either event online, which led to the idea of a video sharing site.[10] Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, and had been influenced by the websiteHot or Not.[11][12]
YouTube began as a venture-funded technology startup, primarily from a $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capitalbetween November 2005 and April 2006.[13] YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California.[14] The domain name
www.youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.[15]
The first YouTube video, titled Me at the zoo, shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo.[16] The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site.[17]
YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005. The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.[18] According to data published by market research company comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with amarket share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos in May 2010.[19]
YouTube says that 300 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute,[20] three times more than one year earlier[21] and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the U.S.[22][23][24]The site has 800 million unique users a month.[25] It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.[26] Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Google and Facebook.[27]
The choice of the name
www.youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website,www.utube.com. The site's owner, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being regularly overloaded by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website towww.utubeonline.com.[28][29]
In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.[30]
Google does not provide detailed figures for YouTube's running costs, and YouTube's revenues in 2007 were noted as "not material" in a regulatory filing.[31] In June 2008, a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at $200 million, noting progress in advertising sales.[32] In January 2012, it was estimated that visitors to YouTube spent an average of 15 minutes a day on the site, in contrast to the four or five hours a day spent by a typical U.S. citizen watching television.[25]
YouTube entered into a marketing and advertising partnership with NBC in June 2006.[33] In November 2008, YouTube reached an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment, and CBS, allowing the companies to post full-length films and television episodes on the site, accompanied by advertisements in a section for US viewers called "Shows". The move was intended to create competition with websites such as Hulu, which features material from NBC, Fox, and Disney.[34][35] In November 2009, YouTube launched a version of "Shows" available to UK viewers, offering around 4,000 full-length shows from more than 60 partners.[36] In January 2010, YouTube introduced an online film rentals service,[37] which is available only to users in the US, Canada and the UK as of 2010.[38][39] The service offers over 6,000 films.[40]
In March 2010, YouTube began free streaming of certain content, including 60 cricket matches of the Indian Premier League. According to YouTube, this was the first worldwide free online broadcast of a major sporting event.[41]
On March 31, 2010, the YouTube website launched a new design, with the aim of simplifying the interface and increasing the time users spend on the site. Google product manager Shiva Rajaraman commented: "We really felt like we needed to step back and remove the clutter."[42] In May 2010, it was reported that YouTube was serving more than two billion videos a day, which it described as "nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined".[43] In May 2011, YouTube reported in its company blog that the site was receiving more than three billion views per day.[23] In January 2012, YouTube stated that the figure had increased to four billion videos streamed per day.[22]
In October 2010, Hurley announced that he would be stepping down as chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role, and that Salar Kamangar would take over as head of the company.[44]
In April 2011, James Zern, a YouTube software engineer, revealed that 30% of videos accounted for 99% of views on the site.[45]
In November 2011, the Google+ social networking site was integrated directly with YouTube and the Chrome web browser, allowing YouTube videos to be viewed from within the Google+ interface.[46] In December 2011, YouTube launched a new version of the site interface, with the video channels displayed in a central column on the home page, similar to the news feeds of social networking sites.[47] At the same time, a new version of the YouTube logo was introduced with a darker shade of red, the first change in design since October 2006.[48]
In May 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program to begin offering some content providers the ability to charge $0.99 per month or more for certain channels, but the vast majority of its videos would remain free to view.[49][50]
Features
Video technology
Playback
Viewing YouTube videos on a personal computer needs the Adobe Flash Player plug-in to be installed on the browser.[51]
In January 2010, YouTube launched an experimental version of the site that uses the built-in multimedia capabilities of web browsers supporting the HTML5standard.[52] This allows videos to be viewed without requiring Adobe Flash Player or any other plug-in to be installed.[53][54] The YouTube site has a page that allows supported browsers to opt into the HTML5 trial. Only browsers that support HTML5 Video using the H.264 or WebM formats can play the videos, and not all videos on the site are available.[55][56]
YouTube experimented with Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH), which is an adaptive bit-rate HTTP-based streaming solution optimizing the bitrate and quality for the available network.[57] Currently they are using Adobe Dynamic Streaming for Flash.[58]
Uploading
All YouTube users can upload videos up to 15 minutes each in duration. Users who have a good track record of complying with the site's Community Guidelines may be offered the ability to upload videos up to 12 hours in length, which requires verifying the account, normally through a mobile phone.[59] When YouTube was launched in 2005, it was possible to upload long videos, but a ten-minute limit was introduced in March 2006 after YouTube found that the majority of videos exceeding this length were unauthorized uploads of television shows and films.[60][61] The 10-minute limit was increased to 15 minutes in July 2010.[62] If an up-to-date browser version is used, videos greater than 20 GB can be uploaded.[63]
YouTube accepts videos uploaded in most container formats, including .AVI, .MKV, .MOV, .MP4, DivX, .FLV, and .ogg and .ogv. These include video formats such asMPEG-4, MPEG, VOB, and .WMV. It also supports 3GP, allowing videos to be uploaded from mobile phones.[64] Videos with progressive scanning or interlaced scanning can be uploaded, but for the best video quality, YouTube suggests interlaced videos be deinterlaced before uploading. All the video formats on YouTube use progressive scanning.[65]
Quality and formats
YouTube originally offered videos at only one quality level, displayed at a resolution of 320x240 pixels using the Sorenson Spark codec (a variant of H.263),[66][67]with mono MP3 audio.[68] In June 2007, YouTube added an option to watch videos in 3GP format on mobile phones.[69] In March 2008, a high quality mode was added, which increased the resolution to 480x360 pixels.[70]
In November 2008, 720p HD support was added. At the time of the 720p launch, the YouTube player was changed from a 4:3 aspect ratio to a widescreen 16:9.[71]With this new feature, YouTube began a switchover to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC as its default video compression format. In November 2009, 1080p HD support was added. In July 2010, YouTube announced that it had launched a range of videos in 4K format, which allows a resolution of up to 4096x3072 pixels.[72][73] YouTube has since lowered the maximum resolution to 3840x2160 pixels, which is twice as many pixels in both directions as 1080p.[74]
In June 2014, YouTube introduced videos playing at 60 frames per second, in order to reproduce video games with a frame rate comparable to high-end graphics cards.[75][76] The videos play back at a resolution of 720p or higher.[77]
YouTube videos are available in a range of quality levels. The former names of standard quality (SQ), high quality (HQ) and high definition (HD) have been replaced by numerical values representing the vertical resolution of the video. The default video stream is encoded in the VP9 format with stereo Vorbis audio; if VP9/WebM is not supported in the browser/device or the browser's user agent reports Windows XP, then H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video with stereo AAC audio is used instead.[78]
3D videos
In a video posted on July 21, 2009,[84] YouTube software engineer Peter Bradshaw announced that YouTube users can now upload 3D videos. The videos can be viewed in several different ways, including the common anaglyph (cyan/red lens) method which utilizes glasses worn by the viewer to achieve the 3D effect.[85][86][87]The YouTube Flash player can display stereoscopic content interleaved in rows, columns or a checkerboard pattern, side-by-side or anaglyph using a red/cyan, green/magenta or blue/yellow combination. In May 2011, an HTML5 version of the YouTube player began supporting side-by-side 3D footage that is compatible withNvidia 3D Vision.[88]
Content accessibility
YouTube offers users the ability to view its videos on web pages outside their website. Each YouTube video is accompanied by a piece of HTML that can be used to embed it on any page on the Web.[89] This functionality is often used to embed YouTube videos in social networking pages and blogs. Users wishing to post a video discussing, inspired by or related to another user's video are able to make a "video response". On August 27, 2013, YouTube announced that it would remove video responses for being an underused feature.[90] Embedding, rating, commenting and response posting can be disabled by the video owner.[91]
YouTube does not usually offer a download link for its videos, and intends for them to be viewed through its website interface.[92] A small number of videos, such as the weekly addresses by President Barack Obama, can be downloaded as MP4 files.[93] Numerous third-party web sites, applications and browser plug-ins allow users to download YouTube videos.[94] In February 2009, YouTube announced a test service, allowing some partners to offer video downloads for free or for a fee paid through Google Checkout.[95] In June 2012, Google sent cease and desist letters threatening legal action against several websites offering online download and conversion of YouTube videos.[96] In response, Zamzar removed the ability to download YouTube videos from its site.[97] The default settings when uploading a video to YouTube will retain a copyright on the video for the uploader, but since July 2012 it has been possible to select a Creative Commons license as the default, allowing other users to reuse and remix the material if it is free of copyright.[98]
Platforms
Most modern smartphones are capable of accessing YouTube videos, either within an application or through an optimized website. YouTube Mobile was launched in June 2007, using RTSP streaming for the video.[99] Not all of YouTube's videos are available on the mobile version of the site.[100]
Since June 2007, YouTube's videos have been available for viewing on a range of Apple products. This required YouTube's content to be transcoded into Apple's preferred video standard, H.264, a process that took several months. YouTube videos can be viewed on devices including Apple TV, iPod Touch and the iPhone.[101]In July 2010, the mobile version of the site was relaunched based on HTML5, avoiding the need to use Adobe Flash Player and optimized for use with touch screen controls.[102] The mobile version is also available as an app for the Android platform.[103][104] In September 2012, YouTube launched its first app for the iPhone, following the decision to drop YouTube as one of the preloaded apps in the iPhone 5 and iOS 6 operating system.[105] According to GlobalWebIndex, YouTube was used by 35% of smartphone users between April and June 2013, making it the third most used app.[106]
A TiVo service update in July 2008 allowed the system to search and play YouTube videos.[107] In January 2009, YouTube launched "YouTube for TV", a version of the website tailored for set-top boxes and other TV-based media devices with web browsers, initially allowing its videos to be viewed on the PlayStation 3 and Wiivideo game consoles.[108][109] In June 2009, YouTube XL was introduced, which has a simplified interface designed for viewing on a standard television screen.[110]YouTube is also available as an app on Xbox Live.[111] On November 15, 2012, Google launched an official app for the Wii, allowing users to watch YouTube videos from the Wii channel.[112] An app is also available for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, and videos can be viewed on the Wii U Internet Browser using HTML5.[113] Google made YouTube available on the Roku player on December 17, 2013[114] and in October 2014, the Sony PlayStation 4.[115]
Localization
On June 19, 2007, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was in Paris to launch the new localization system.[116] The interface of the website is available with localized versions in 74 countries, one territory (Hong Kong) and a worldwide version.[117]
| [show]Country | Language | Launch date |
|---|
The YouTube interface suggests which local version should be chosen on the basis of the IP address of the user. In some cases, the message "This video is not available in your country" may appear because of copyright restrictions or inappropriate content.[162]
The interface of the YouTube website is available in 61 language versions, including Amharic, Bengali, Persian and Urdu, which do not have local channel versions.[3]
Access to YouTube was blocked in Turkey between 2008 and 2010, following controversy over the posting of videos deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and some material offensive to Muslims.[163][164] In October 2012, a local version of YouTube was launched in Turkey, with the domain
youtube.com.tr. The local version is subject to the content regulations found in Turkish law.[165]
In March 2009, a dispute between YouTube and the British royalty collection agency PRS for Music led to premium music videos being blocked for YouTube users in the United Kingdom. The removal of videos posted by the major record companies occurred after failure to reach agreement on a licensing deal. The dispute was resolved in September 2009.[166] In April 2009, a similar dispute led to the removal of premium music videos for users in Germany.[167]
Music Key
Main article: Music Key
On November 12, 2014, YouTube announced the launch of Music Key, a subscription music streaming service, providing advertising-free playback of official music videos hosted by YouTube, along with background and offline playback on mobile platforms. Music Key is intended to integrate with and replace the existing Google Play Music "All Access" service.[168][169][170]
April Fools
YouTube has featured an April Fools prank on the site on April 1 of every year since 2008:
- 2008: All the links to the videos on the main page were redirected to Rick Astley's music video "Never Gonna Give You Up", a prank known as "Rickrolling".[171][172]
- 2009: When clicking on a video on the main page, the whole page turned upside down. YouTube claimed that this was a new layout.[173]
- 2010: YouTube temporarily released a "TEXTp" mode, which translated the colors in the videos to random upper case letters. YouTube claimed in a message that this was done in order to reduce bandwidth costs by $1 per second.[174]
- 2011: The site celebrated its "100th anniversary" with a "1911 button" and a range of sepia-toned silent, early 1900s-style films, including "Flugelhorn Feline", a parody of Keyboard Cat.[175]
- 2012: Clicking on the image of a DVD next to the site logo led to a video about "The YouTube Collection", an option to order every YouTube video for home delivery on DVD, videocassette, Laserdisc, or Betamax tapes. The spoof promotional video touted "the complete YouTube experience completely offline."[176]
- 2013: YouTube teamed up with newspaper satire company The Onion to claim that the video sharing website was launched as a contest which had finally come to an end, and would announce a winner of the contest when the site went back up in 2023. A video of two presenters announcing the nominees streamed live for twelve hours.[177]
- 2014: YouTube announced that it was responsible for the creation of all viral video trends, and revealed previews of upcoming memes, such as "Clocking", "Kissing Dad", and "Glub Glub Water Dance".[178]
Social impact
Main article: Social impact of YouTube
Both private individuals[179] and large production companies[180] have used YouTube to grow audiences. Independent content creators have built grassroots followings numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort, while mass retail and radio promotion proved problematic.[179] Concurrently, old media celebrities moved into the website at the invitation of a YouTube management that witnessed early content creators accruing substantial followings, and perceived audience sizes potentially larger than that attainable by television.[180] While YouTube's revenue-sharing "Partner Program" made it possible to earn a substantial living as a video producer—its top five hundred partners each earning more than $100,000 annually[181]—in 2012 CMU business editor characterized YouTube as "a free-to-use... promotional platform for the music labels".[182] In 2013 Forbes' Katheryn Thayer asserted that digital-era artists' work must not only be of high quality, but must elicit reactions on the YouTube platform and social media.[183] In 2013, videos of the 2.5% of artists categorized as "mega", "mainstream" and "mid-sized" received 90.3% of the relevant views on YouTube and Vevo.[184] By early 2013 Billboard had announced that it was factoring YouTube streaming data into calculation of theBillboard Hot 100 and related genre charts.[185]
Observing that face-to-face communication of the type that online videos convey has been "fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution", TED curator Chris Andersonreferred to several YouTube contributors and asserted that "what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication".[186] Anderson asserted that it's not far-fetched to say that online video will dramatically accelerate scientific advance, and that video contributors may be about to launch "the biggest learning cycle in human history."[186] In education, for example, the Khan Academy grew from YouTube video tutoring sessions for founder Salman Khan's cousin into what Forbes' Michael Noer called "the largest school in the world", with technology poised to disrupt how people learn.[187]
YouTube was awarded a 2008 George Foster Peabody Award, the website being described as a Speakers' Corner that "both embodies and promotes democracy."[188] The Washington Post reported that a disproportionate share of YouTube's most subscribed channels feature minorities, contrasting with mainstream television in which the stars are largely white
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