Put It on YouTube!
December 17th, 2008, Posted in Uncategorized by Gladys Chua
Be it school performance, birthday celebration or just silly college students pulling stunts on each other, whenever we want to share videos, we put it on YouTube.
Everyone knows YouTube. (Well, almost everyone)
Video sharing changes the way we interact online, bringing the evolution of online communication to the next level, from mere texts and pictures in blogs and emails to visuals and sounds of an user-generated video. Definitely, its not just YouTube, but the emergence of various video sharing that brought about this change.
So what makes YouTube so phenomenal?
Background
YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. YouTube is the leader in online video, sharing original videos worldwide through a Web experience.
YouTube received funding from Sequoia Capital in November 2005 and was officially launched one month later in December. In November 2006, within a year of its launch, YouTube was purchased by Google Inc. in one of the most talked-about acquisitions to date.
YouTube has struck numerous partnership deals with content providers such as CBS, BBC, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, NBA, The Sundance Channel and many more.
Recent Updates
In March 2007, Viacom introduced its much talked about $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube. The lawsuit was preceded by a takedown request from Viacom ordering YouTube to remove over 100,000 clips from its stable of networks.
In June 2007 YouTube launched local versions in Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the U.K. Additionally in June, Apple’s iPhone launched with a YouTube application, further extending YouTube’s penetration in the mobile market following its November 2006 partnership with Verizon’s vCast service.
Over the summer and fall of 2007 major announcements were made about advertising models for YouTube. In August, YouTube introduced “YouTube InVideo Ads”, a set of flash overlays displayed on the lower portion of videos. In October, Google announced the inclusion of YouTube videos in its AdSense product.
In October 2007, YouTube announced a new service called “Youtube Video Identification” in order to assist copyright holders in protecting their content. Copyright holders can then either have YouTube remove the videos in question or allow YouTube to serve advertising along with the content and split the resulting revenue.
Tour in YouTube
It was an eye opener for the ileaders to take a tour around the YouTube office. Especially with the known acquisition by Google, many of us wondered how similar will the culture of YouTube be to Google, or will it display a culture of its own. The envrionment was cheery, relax and pleasant to work in. In my opinion there were no visible signs of takeover by Google.
Hong Qu did a wonderful introduction of YouTube and we understood more on the designing of the webpage. We also had fun fiddling around the eye tracker machine, which tracks the eye focus on different areas of the page, and this study aids the designing of the website.
Unfortunately, we were unable to meet any of upper management on our visit. There were many burning questions that we were eager to ask, such as how have things changed since Google bought over YouTube, their expansion plans and revenue model.
Nevertheless, it had been a good experience walking around YouTube, taking photos with the graffiti wall and the YouTube logo, and not forgetting, our favourite PLAY-er tee-shirts!
And to all ileaders who have taken any videos in this trip, Put it on YouTube!
