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YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share video clips, and view them in the MPEG-4 format. 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, the BBC, UMG 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 a venture-funded technology startup, primarily from 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 15 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 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 NBC, Fox, and Disney.

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.

Youtube was awarded a 2008 George Foster Peabody Award and cited for being ''a 'Speakers' Corner,' where Internet users can upload, view and share clips, is an ever-expanding archive-cum-bulletin board that both embodies and promotes democracy.''

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:

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, conspiracy theories and religion.

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. 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 December 3, 2006, Iran temporarily blocked access to YouTube, along with several other sites, after declaring them as violating social and moral codes of conducts. The YouTube ban came after a video was posted online that appears to show an Iranian soap opera star having sex. The block has since been lifted.

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, as the Pakistani block was inadvertently transferred to other countries. Pakistan lifted its block 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, .MKV, .MOV, MPEG, .MP4, DivX, .FLV, and .OGG. It also supports 3GP, allowing videos to be uploaded directly from a mobile phone.

Video quality

YouTube originally offered videos in only one format, but it now has three main formats, as well as a ''mobile'' format, for viewing on mobile phones. The original format, now labelled ''standard quality'', displays videos at a resolution of 320x240 using the Sorenson Spark codec, with mono MP3 audio. This was, at the time, the standard for streaming online videos.

''High quality'' videos, introduced in March 2008, are shown at 480x360 with mono MP3 sound. They can also be viewed with the H.264 codec and stereo AAC audio by adding &fmt=18 to the end of the video URL. This offers a significant improvement over standard quality. This was followed up in November 2008 by 720p HD support. At the same time, the YouTube player was changed from a 3 aspect ratio to widescreen 9. This was introduced more than a year behind competing website Vimeo. 720p videos are shown in full 1280x720 and encoded with the H.264 codec. They also feature stereo audio encoded with AAC. From February 2009, all new videos are shown using H.264 and AAC by default for both ''Standard'' and ''High Quality'' viewing, allowing for higher quality videos at approximately the same file size.

Format and quality comparison tabledate=May 2009

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 ''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 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:

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