|
|
|
|
YouTube
|
| |
|
| |
YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. 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.
Discussion
Ask a question about 'YouTube' Start a new discussion about 'YouTube' Answer questions from other users |
Recent Posts
Encyclopedia
YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. 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 YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS and the BBC and other organizations 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. Accounts of registered users are called "channels".
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, pornography, copyright violations, and material encouraging criminal conduct is prohibited by YouTube's terms of service.
Company history
YouTube 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 YouTube 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 first YouTube video was entitled Me at the zoo, and shows founder Jawed Karim at San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site.
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 43 percent and more than six billion videos viewed in January 2009. 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.
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.
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.
Social impact
Before the launch of YouTube in 2005, there were few simple methods available for ordinary computer users who wanted to post videos online. With its easy to use interface, YouTube made it possible for anyone who could use a computer to post a video that millions of people could watch within a few minutes. The wide range of topics covered by YouTube has turned video sharing into one of the most important parts of Internet culture.
An early example of the social impact of YouTube was the success of the Bus Uncle video in 2006. It shows an animated conversation between a youth and an older man on a bus in Hong Kong, and was discussed widely in the mainstream media. Another YouTube video to receive extensive coverage is guitar, which features a performance of Pachelbel's Canon on an electric guitar. The name of the performer is not given in the video, and after it received millions of views The New York Times revealed the identity of the guitarist as Jeong-Hyun Lim, a 23-year-old from South Korea who had recorded the track in his bedroom.
Criticism
Copyrighted material
YouTube has been criticized frequently for failing to ensure that its online content adheres to the law of copyright. At the time of uploading a video, YouTube users are shown a screen with the following message:
Do not upload any TV shows, music videos, music concerts or commercials without permission unless they consist entirely of content you created yourself. The Copyright Tips page and the Community Guidelines can help you determine whether your video infringes someone else's copyright.
Despite this advice, there are still many unauthorized clips from television shows, films and music videos on YouTube. YouTube does not view videos before they are posted online, and it is left to copyright holders to issue a takedown notice under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Organizations including Viacom and the English Premier League have issued lawsuits against YouTube, claiming that it has done too little to prevent the uploading of copyrighted material. Viacom, demanding US$1 billion in damages, said that it had found more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of its material on YouTube that had been viewed "an astounding 1.5 billion times". YouTube responded by stating that it "goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works". Since Viacom issued its lawsuit, YouTube has introduced a system called Video ID, which checks uploaded videos against a database of copyrighted content with the aim of reducing violations.
In August 2008, a U.S. court ruled that copyright holders cannot order the removal of an online file without first determining whether the posting reflected fair use of the material. The case involved Stephanie Lenz from Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, who had made a home video of her 13-month-old son dancing to Prince's song "Let's Go Crazy" and posted the 29-second video on YouTube.
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.
Inappropriate content
YouTube has also faced criticism over the offensive content in some of its videos. Although YouTube's terms of service forbid the uploading of material likely to be considered inappropriate, the inability to check all videos before they go online means that occasional lapses are inevitable. Controversial areas for videos have included Holocaust denial and the Hillsborough Disaster, in which 96 football fans from Liverpool were crushed to death in 1989.
YouTube relies on its users to flag the content of videos as inappropriate, and a member of staff will view a flagged video to determine whether it violates the site's terms of service. In July 2008 the Culture and Media Committee of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom stated that it was "unimpressed" with YouTube's system for policing its videos, and argued that "Proactive review of content should be standard practice for sites hosting user generated content." YouTube responded by stating: "We have strict rules on what's allowed, and a system that enables anyone who sees inappropriate content to report it to our 24/7 review team and have it dealt with promptly. We educate our community on the rules and include a direct link from every YouTube page to make this process as easy as possible for our users. Given the volume of content uploaded on our site, we think this is by far the most effective way to make sure that the tiny minority of videos that break the rules come down quickly."
Blocking
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 Erdogan 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.
Technical notes
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 YouTube are limited to ten minutes in length and a file size of 1 GB. When YouTube 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.
Video quality
YouTube's videos are distributed through streaming media technology in a range of formats, with the video and audio quality dependent on the platform. YouTube's website interface offers users the choice of two quality levels, normal and high, both of which are based on the Flash Video container format. These videos are Sorenson Spark H.263 encoded, with the audio in mono MP3 format. The normal quality videos have a resolution of 320x240 pixels and have been in use since the launch of the site in 2005, while the high quality videos launched in March 2008 have a resolution of 480x360 pixels. YouTube chooses which videos are made available in the high quality format by analyzing the quality of the uploaded videos. YouTube's high quality videos are also available in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format with stereo AAC audio. The MPEG-4 videos can be played by adding "&fmt=18" to the web address of a video.
In late November 2008, YouTube changed the aspect ratio of its web video player from the traditional 4:3 to the widescreen 16:9. This is applied to all videos, so the 4:3 videos are screened in a pillarbox format. It was also announced in November 2008 that YouTube now offers some of its videos in true HD format, with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels. Videos uploaded with 720 pixel resolution can be viewed in this format by selecting the "watch in HD" option, or by adding "&fmt=22" to the web address.
Format and quality comparison table
Comparison of YouTube media types | | Standard | High (default) | High (non-default) | HD | Mobile |
|---|
| Container | FLV | FLV | MP4 | MP4 | 3GP | | fmt value | | 6 | 18 | 22 | 17 | | Video encoding | H.263 | H.263 | H.264/MPEG-4 AVC | H.264/MPEG-4 AVC | H.263/AMR | | Video resolution | 320×240 | 480×360 | 480×360 | 1280×720 | 176×144 | | Video bitrate (kbit/s) | 200 | 900 | 512 | 2000 | | | Audio encoding | MP3 | MP3 | AAC | AAC | AAC | | Audio bitrate (kbit/s) | 64 | 96 | 128 | 232 | | | Audio channels | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | | | Audio sampling rate (Hz) | 22050 | 44100 | 44100 | 44100 | |
Content accessibility
Embedding
One of the key features of YouTube is the ability of users to view its videos on web pages outside the site. Each YouTube video is accompanied by a piece of HTML, which can be used to embed it on a page outside the YouTube website. This functionality is often used to embed YouTube videos in social networking pages and blogs.
Mobile phones
Some mobile phones are capable of accessing YouTube videos, dependent on the provider and the data plan. YouTube Mobile was launched in June 2007, and uses RTSP streaming for the video. Not all of YouTube's videos are available on the mobile version of the site.
Other platforms
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 and the iPhone. A TiVo service update in July 2008 allowed the system to search and play YouTube videos. In January 2009, YouTube launched a dedicated channel allowing its videos to be viewed on the PlayStation 3 and Wii video game consoles.
Downloads
YouTube does not usually offer a download link for its videos, and intends that they are viewed through its website interface. A small number of videos, such as the weekly addresses by Barack Obama, can be downloaded as MP4 files. There are also third-party web sites, applications and browser plug-ins that offer a way to get a download link for all videos on the website.
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.
Localization
On June 19, 2007, Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt was in Paris to launch the new localization system. The entire interface of the website is now available with localized versions in 22 countries:
Plans for YouTube to create a local version in Turkey have run into problems, since the Turkish authorities asked YouTube to set up an office in Turkey, which would be subject to Turkish law. YouTube says that it has no intention of doing this, and that its videos are not subject to Turkish law. Turkish authorities have expressed concerns that YouTube has been used to post videos insulting to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and other material offensive to Muslims.
Channel types
People with YouTube accounts are able to join groups called "Channel Types" that make their channel more distinctive. The types are:
- Comedian, comedians displaying their comedy performances for YouTube viewers.
- Director, movie makers displaying their videos for YouTube viewers.
- Guru, people who are experienced in a certain field make videos of what they do.
- Musician, musicians or bands covering songs or displaying originals or giving lessons on songs, scales, chords, etc.
- Non-profit, a status obtained by 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations accepted into YouTube's non-profit program.
- Reporter, civilians or professionals who make videos about local or international news and current events.
- Politician, one who is running for or currently involved with the politics of government.
- YouTuber, a general viewer of YouTube.
Video rankings
YouTube has a number of ways of ranking its videos, the most popular of which is "most viewed", which is divided into four categories: today, this week, this month, and all time. The other rankings are:
- Featured
- Rising Videos
- Most Discussed
- Most Viewed
- Top Favorited
- Most Popular
- Most Responded
- Top Rated
Controversies over video rankings
The viewing figures of some YouTube videos have been the subject of controversy, since there have been claims that automated systems have been used to inflate the number of views received, which is forbidden by YouTube's terms of service. In March 2008, an unofficial video of the song "Music Is My Hot Hot Sex" by the Brazilian band Cansei De Ser Sexy briefly held the number one slot for the all-time most viewed video, with around 114 million views. It was temporarily removed from YouTube after allegations of automated viewing or hacking, before being deleted by the uploader. The viewing figures for the video outnumbered the "most favorited" rating by around 21,000 to 1, compared to around 500 to 1 for other top rated YouTube videos. YouTube's terms of service state: "You agree not to use or launch any automated system, including without limitation, "robots," "spiders," or "offline readers," that accesses the Website in a manner that sends more request messages to the YouTube servers in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce in the same period by using a conventional on-line web browser." A spokesperson for YouTube commented: "We are developing safeguards to secure the statistics on YouTube. Although it is somewhat difficult to track how often this happens, it is not rampant. As soon as it comes to our attention that someone has rigged their numbers to gain placement on the top pages we remove the video or channel from public view." Clarus Bartel from Italy, who had uploaded the video, denied attempting to boost its ranking, stating: "These gimmicks do not belong to me. I've got nothing to do with it. The accusations geared towards me have saddened me greatly."
The YouTube video of the Avril Lavigne song "Girlfriend" was also accused of having an exaggerated number of views due to the use of a web link posted by AvrilBandAids, a fansite devoted to Avril Lavigne. Clicking on the link would automatically reload the YouTube video of Girlfriend every fifteen seconds. Fans of Avril Lavigne were encouraged to: "Keep this page open while you browse the internet, study for exams, or even sleep. For extra viewing power, open up two or more browser windows at this page!" The video of "Girlfriend" overtook "Evolution of Dance" by Judson Laipply as the all-time most viewed video on YouTube in July 2008. , "Girlfriend" has around 116 million views, whilst "Evolution of Dance" has around 115 million.
See also
Further reading
- Lacy, Sarah: The Stories of Facebook, YouTube and MySpace: The People, the Hype and the Deals Behind the Giants of Web 2.0 (2008) ISBN 978-1854584533
External links
|
| |
|
|
