 YouTube
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.
The San Bruno-based
service 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
videoblogging and short original videos. In October 2006, Google
Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company
for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November
13, 2006. YOUTUBE.CM is an ad site. YouTube.CA is a
Canadian version of YouTube.com
Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while
registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of
videos. Some videos are available only to users of age 18 or older
(e.g. videos containing potentially offensive content). The
uploading of videos containing pornography, nudity, defamation,
harassment, commercial advertisements and material encouraging
criminal conduct is prohibited. Related videos, determined by
title and tags, appear onscreen to the right of a given video. In
YouTube's second year, functions were added to enhance user
ability to post video 'responses' and subscribe to content feeds.
Few statistics are publicly available regarding the number of
videos on YouTube. However, in July 2006, the company revealed
that more than 100 million videos were being watched every day,
and 2.5 billion videos were watched in June 2006. 50,000 videos
were being added per day in May 2006, and this increased to 65,000
by July. In January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users had made
over 3 billion video views.
In August 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article
revealing that YouTube was hosting about 6.1 million videos
(requiring about 45 terabytes of storage space), and had about
500,000 user accounts.[5] As of April 9, 2008, a YouTube search
returns about 83.4 million videos and 3.75 million user channels.
It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth
as the entire Internet in 2000, and that over 13 hours of video
are uploaded every minute. In March 2008, its bandwidth costs were
estimated at approximately $1 million a day.
As of Q1 2008, YouTube was not profitable, with its revenues in
2007 being noted as "not material" by Google in a regulatory
filing. Exact revenue or profit numbers are not published, but a
June 2008 Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at
$200 million, noting progress in ad sales. At that time, the price
for an ad on the YouTube home page was $175,000 per day (plus a
$50,000 commitment to buy Google/YouTube ads elsewhere), and a
branded channel (distinguished by a customized background) cost
advertisers $200,000.
YouTube.cm
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.
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