you tube

you tube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for US$1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on you tube has been uploaded by members of the public, although media organizations including CBS and the BBC offer some of their material via the site.

Unregistered users can watch the videos, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos that are considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users over the age of 18. The uploading of videos containing defamation, commercial advertisements, copyright violations, and material encouraging criminal conduct is prohibited by you tube terms of service.

Company history

you tube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Chad Hurley and Steve 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. Jawed Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, and Chad Hurley commented that the idea that you tube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible."

YouTube began as an angel funded technology startup, with help including a US$11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006. YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 15, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months. The choice of the domain name www.youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, www.utube.com. The owner of the site, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being overloaded on a regular basis by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website to www.utubeonline.com.

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.According to data published by market research company comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 44 percent and more than five billion videos viewed in July 2008. It is estimated that 13 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. In March 2008, YouTube's bandwidth costs were estimated at approximately US$1 million a day.Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Yahoo! and Google.

In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006. 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. In June 2008 a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at US$200 million, noting progress in advertising sales.

In November 2008, YouTube reached an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment and CBS which will allow the companies to post full-length films and television shows on the site, accompanied by advertisements. The move is intended to create competition with websites such as Hulu, which features material from both NBC and Fox.

Privacy

In July 2008, Viacom won a court ruling requiring YouTube to hand over data detailing the viewing habits of every user who has watched videos on the site. The move led to concerns that the viewing habits of individual users could be identified through a combination of their IP addresses and login names. The decision was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which called the court ruling "a set-back to privacy rights". U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton dismissed the privacy concerns as "speculative", and ordered YouTube to hand over documents totalling around 12 terabytes of data. Judge Stanton rejected Viacom's request for YouTube to hand over the source code of its search engine system, saying that there was no evidence that YouTube treated videos infringing copyright differently.

Several countries have blocked access to YouTube since its inception, including China, Iran, Morocco, and Thailand. YouTube is currently blocked in Turkey after controversy over videos deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Despite the block, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan admitted to journalists that he could access YouTube, since the site is still available in Turkey by using an open proxy.

On February 23, 2008, Pakistan blocked YouTube due to "offensive material" towards the Islamic faith, including display of the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. This led to a near global blackout of the YouTube site for around two hours. The block was lifted on February 26, 2008. Many Pakistanis circumvented the three day block by using Virtual Private Network software.

Schools in some countries have blocked access to YouTube due to students uploading videos of bullying behavior, school fights, racist behavior, and other inappropriate content.

Blocking

Schools in some countries have blocked access to YouTube due to students uploading videos of bullying behavior, school fights, racist behavior, and other inappropriate content.

Video format

YouTube's video playback technology for web users is based on the Adobe Flash Player. This allows the site to display videos with quality comparable to more established video playback technologies (such as Windows Media Player, QuickTime, and RealPlayer) that generally require the user to download and install a web browser plug-in in order to view video. Viewing Flash video also requires a plug-in, but market research from Adobe Systems has found that its Flash plug-in is installed on over 95% of personal computers.

Videos uploaded to you tube are limited to ten minutes in length and a file size of 1 GB. When you tube was launched in 2005, it was possible for any user to upload videos longer than ten minutes, but YouTube's help section now states: "You can no longer upload videos longer than ten minutes regardless of what type of account you have. Users who had previously been allowed to upload longer content still retain this ability, so you may occasionally see videos that are longer than ten minutes." The 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.

YouTube accepts videos uploaded in most formats, including .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, MPEG, .MP4, DivX, .FLV, and .OGG. It also supports 3GP, allowing videos to be uploaded directly from a mobile phone.

YouTube accepts common video file formats and converts them to Flash Video in order to make them available for online viewing. Since June 2007, newly uploaded videos have also been encoded using the H.264 video standard to enable streaming of YouTube videos on devices that support H.264 streaming.

On mobile

you tube launched its mobile site, you tube Mobile on June 15, 2007. It is based on xHTML and uses 3GP videos with H.263/AMR codec and RTSP streaming. It is available via a web interface at m.youtube.com or via you tube's Mobile Java Application.

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