Blog

Yesterday was the 5th birthday for YouTube. Happy Birthday! The domain youtube.com was registered on 14th February, 2005 on the valentine’s day. Within 5 years, it has been the number one online video resource of the world. Congratulations!

Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for $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, as part of the YouTube partnership program.

YouTube wasn’t the clear leader in 2005. It competed with a range of services from Veoh to Vimeo to Viddler and many more. Some combination of easy uploading, embeddable videos and an early decision to serve up all clips in Flash (plus, some would argue, lenient policies on copyrighted content) eventually saw YouTube emerge as the victor in the video battle.

Some smart 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.

Source: Wikipedia, Mashable