YouTube
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YouTube is a website that allows users to upload, view, and share video clips. It was founded in February 2005 by three early employees of PayPal. YouTube has fifty employees and is located in San Mateo, California.
YouTube uses Adobe Flash to serve its content, which includes movie and TV show clips, music videos, and homemade videos. Video feeds of YouTube videos can also be easily embedded on blogs and other websites. YouTube prohibits the posting of copyrighted video by anyone but the copyright holder, though it isn't hard to find copyrighted material on the site.
History
YouTube was founded in February, 2005 by Chad Hurley (CEO), Steve Chen (CTO), and Jawed Karim (advisor), who were all early employees of PayPal.Graham, Jefferson (November 21, 2005). ["Video further websites pop up, invite postings"] USAToday Prior to PayPal, Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.University of Illinois Department of Computer Science (2006). ["YouTube: Sharing Digital Camera Videos"] The domain name "YouTube.com" was activated on February 15, 2005,[youtube.com overview] by Alexa with the website launching shortly thereafter. In November, 2005, venture capital firm, Sequoia, invested $3.5 million in YouTube.Woolley, Scott (March 13, 2006). ["Raw and Random"], p. 27. Forbes. Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, former CFO of PayPal, joined the board of directors at YouTube. In April, 2006, Sequoia Capital invested a further $8 million in YouTube. [Sequoia invests 11.5 million total in YouTube], accessed July 7, 2006
The site's popularity surged in December 2005 when it hosted the popular Lazy Sunday clip from a Saturday Night Live broadcast.[YouTube hosts Lazy Sunday], accessed July 7, 2006 In February, 2006, NBC Universal asked YouTube to remove several copyrighted NBC video clips, including Lazy Sunday and 2006 Olympics clips, from their site.[NBC Pressures Websites on Video Clips] by Andrew Wallenstein, 22 February 2006, Backstage.com
In April 2006, YouTube set a 10-minute limit on videos, except those uploaded through its Director Program.
By June 2006, NBC had reconsidered its approach and announced a strategic partnership with YouTube. Under the terms of the partnership, NBC will among other things create an official NBC Channel on YouTube to showcase its preview clips for The Office. YouTube will also promote NBC's videos throughout its site. [link]
CBS, which had previously also asked YouTube to remove several of its clips, similarly reassessed its relationship with YouTube in July 2006. In a statement indicative of how the traditional media industry's perception of YouTube has changed, Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports noted:
- Our inclination now is, the more exposure we get from clips like that, the better it is for CBS News and the CBS television network, so in retrospect we probably should have embraced the exposure, and embraced the attention it was bringing CBS, instead of being parochial and saying ‘let’s pull it down.’ [link]
Growth
YouTube is among the fastest-growing websites in the history of the World Wide Web, ranked as the 18th most popular website on Alexa, and far outpacing MySpace's growth [link].
As of July 2006, 70,000 new videos are uploaded and 100 million clips are watched on YouTube every day. The site has almost 20 million visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. [link]
Criticisms
Video quality
Like Google Video and other video sites, there are complaints about the quality of playback. Sometimes audio and video are out of sync and other times the playback ends prematurely.Quicktime files
In most cases, Quicktime files do not work well with YouTube. Most of these files, including those ripped from enhanced CDs, end up with poor audio/video synchronization. This is a result from the file having to change formats when it is uploaded to the site.Copyright infringement
YouTube policy does not allow content to be uploaded by anyone other than the copyright holder, and the company frequently removes uploaded videos that infringe on copyrights, but a large amount of copyrighted material is uploaded nonetheless. Generally, YouTube only discovers these videos when they are reported by the YouTube community, or when the copyright holder reports them. The primary way in which YouTube identifies the content of a video is through the search terms that uploaders associate with clips.Some users have taken to creating code words as search terms to be entered when uploading specific type of files. For instance the Internet Wrestling Community uses the term "cheese souffle" as a search term to indicate an upload of a WWE video, apparently to circumvent YouTube locating illegal files and removing them. While YouTube has cut down on the WWE-trademarked clips, more continue to be uploaded.
Video Format
The file format used by YouTube is Flash Video, or *.flv, and can be viewed on its own by using one of many FLV viewing programs available. The FLV video files can be downloaded in a number of ways. One can pull temporary .DAT files from the TEMP folder, use client-based solutions like bookmarklets and Greasemonkey scripts [1024k.de] (Video Bookmarklet and Greasemonkey scripts for YouTube) or resort to server-based services such as [Javimoya], [YouTubeX] or [Keepvid] to save the video clips. There is also a popular plugin for Mozilla Firefox, which allows easy downloading of .flv files.Revenue model
Some industry commentators have speculated that YouTube's running costs — specifically the bandwidth required — may be as high as $1 million USD per month, Frommer, Dan. ["Your Tube, Whose Dime?"]. ''Forbes'. April 27, 2006. thereby fuelling criticisms that the company does not have a viable business model. Advertisements were launched on the site beginning in March 2006.In April 2006, YouTube started using Google AdSense.
Inaccurate listings
When users upload videos, they are responsible for providing a textual description of the video along with a list of tags. While most videos have correct tags that are relevant to the content of the video itself, quite a few videos are intentionally mislabeled by their posters in an attempt to artificially gain popularity. For example, a video of a sporting event could be intentionally mislabeled with the tag "Family Guy" in an effort to attract viewings for those searching for Family Guy videos which has nothing to do with sporting events.Violence
On their 6:30 PM bulletin on June 1, 2006, ITV News reported that YouTube and sites like it were encouraging violence and bullying amongst teenagers, who were filming fights on their mobile phones (see happy slapping), and then uploading them to YouTube. While YouTube provides a facility for reporting excessively violent videos, the news report stated that communication with the website was difficult. ITV News, 6:30 PM bulletin on ITV1, 1 June 2006Menus and anotation
YouTube lacks any end user tools to make annotations, menus or chapters out of long format videos. Lacking this feature will slow down the acceptance of the service for longer format videos like lectures and distance education uses.Spammers
YouTube is getting a reputation for having many of the videos posted bombarded with spam comments which are often repeated on multiple posts and sometimes even on videos that are "featured" on the main 'home' page of YouTube. A great majority of the spam comments are about the website 'TreasureTrooper', where the user who posts the comment, says "I made *amount of money* by going to Treasure Trooper."
Spin-off sites
The embeddable nature of YouTube has bred several "best of" sites. These sites range from small, non-commercial, independently programed endeavours, to larger, ambitious, hierarchically displayed, viewer rated sites. Although some industry watchers feel that the community features of YouTube may mitigate this trend, others believe we may be seeing the stirrings of next generation stations or networks and are throwing around terms like "micro-network", "boutique station", "curated site", and "clip programming". Examples of such spin-off sites would include TinyPic and MySpace Videos.See also
Notes and references
External links
- [YouTube Official Website]
- [So That's Why MySpace Blocked YouTube], 10 January 2006, Techdirt
- [Critic's Notebook: Now Playing on YouTube: Web Videos by Everyone], 3 April2005, The New York Times
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