Detailed Overview of Google's Youtube Video Sharing Giant

Arguably, the most popular video sharing website for online video watchers and amateur video producers is Youtube.com. It is one of the largest video communities found on the net. Owned by Google, this popular video sharing website lets its users view and upload video files. Besides hosting videos, this service lets the users to rate the videos available on the site, add their comments, and subscribe to their favorite producers.

You Tube was founded in a garage in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in the city of San Mateo, California, USA and it was officially launched in December of same year. Soon after, it became an instant hit among its users.

Adobe Flash technology is the preferred choice to play back a wide variety of video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos thus providing a huge store on the net for safekeeping video clips and files. This is a standard format supported by most browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Videos can be played on some mobile devices and even on the Nintendo Wii game system. During the summer of 2006, YouTube.com was ranked the 5th most popular website on Alexa, far out-pacing even MySpace's rate of growth. According to a survey, 100 million video clips are viewed daily, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded every 24 hours. The website averages nearly 20 million visitors per month. The video sharing site’s pre-eminence in the online video market is substantial. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the video sharing giant. The deal closed on November 13, 2006 even though it was not yet earning a profit.

Videos are hosted and served from YouTube's website only. Videos can be watched directly on the website or they may be embedded in other locations, such as blogs and other websites. This means that you can view videos without being actually on their site. It also means that you can use the site as your store house for video contents to spice up your own website. Unregistered users can watch nearly all videos available on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Registration is free. Some videos are available only to users of age 18+ years. In the company’s second year, many functions were added to enhance user's ability to post responses and subscribe to the content feeds.

Videos can be found in many ways. It could be searched by keywords, browsed by topic, or even by scanning the list of the most popular videos. If you are fond of a particular video producer you can subscribe to that user's videos also. They claim to foster a sense of community. This community atmosphere has created Internet video stars, including mentions in many magazines and television shows.

To upload video contents a free registered account is required. The most popular video formats like .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG can be uploaded using the registered account. YouTube automatically converts these files to Flash when they are uploaded. YouTube does not allow you to download easily videos. There are third party tools that allow you to do so, but they are not encouraged or supported by YouTube.

YouTube's contents are always not safe for work or suitable for children. Copyright abuses are widespread. However, this popular video sharing website is still changing the world, riding on the wave of strong popularity. Recently they have planned to share advertisement revenue with users, but details are still awaited.