Info about Videos
YouTube history
For those who did not yet find out what YouTube is (although I guess there are very few), it is a video sharing site where users can upload videos of their own, they can share them with their friends or even the entire world. It is not very complicated, in case you have a video you wish to share, you simply create a user and a password and then upload a video, for free. If someone wishes to only view videos on YouTube, a user name and a password are not required they are required only for videos that contain potentially offensive content. The first YouTube video was uploaded by one of the founders, Jawed, and is entitled “Me at the zoo” and it shows him at the San Diego Zoo.
YouTube was created in February 2005, by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. It seems that there is a story behind it, as it was related in the media, in which Chad and Steve came with the idea of video sharing in early 2005, after a diner party that had taken place at Chen’s house and to which only Chad had participated. Because Jawed was not present at the diner, he denied that diner ever existed. In November 2006, YouTube was bought by Google Inc. for the amount of 1.65 billion dollars and is now a subsidiary of Google. The company’s headquarters are in Bruno California and the program used for video and audio sharing is Adobe Flash Video. Most of YouTube content is uploaded by individuals, but also corporations like BBC, VEVO, CBS and others offer their materials on the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program. The choice of the name www.youtube.com initially led to some similarity problems as there was a company, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment that had a site www.utube.com. The owner of the Universal Tube started a lawsuit in November 2006 after being overloaded with individuals looking for YouTube. They ended up in changing their site name to www.utubeonline.com. In November 2008, YouTube closed an agreement with CBS, Lions Gate Entertainment and MGM, allowing the companies to upload full length films, film trailers and television episodes on the site. This move was in order to create competition with sites such as Hulu, which have an agreement with NBC, Fox and Disney.
Before YouTube, there were very few possibilities to upload videos and these sites had just limited space for storage. With YouTube, the interface is easy and anyone can upload as many videos, photos or clips as they wish. The extremely wide range of topics covered by YouTube has turned video sharing into one of the most important parts of Internet culture. There are videos that have millions of views; a person can watch a video as many times as he/she wishes.
In 2010, YouTube announced that they introduced automatic captioning for videos, in order to make the site more accessible for people that are deaf or have hearing problems.