YouTube is a video hosting and viewing platform owned by Google Inc. The platform launched in 2005 as a venture-funded startup and grew quickly over the course of months. Thousands of videos were uploaded to the site in mid-2006 and the rising popularity of the platform seems to have convinced Google to make a bid for it in 2006.
Google acquired YouTube and the platforms technology in October 2005 for more than $1.6 Billion US Dollar in stock, and it was shortly thereafter that Google retired its own video hosting service, Google Video in favor of the new platform.
YouTube today is one of the most popular websites on the Internet and usually found in the top 5 sites on statistics platforms such as Alexa or Comcast.
On January 2012 YouTube for the first time surpassed 4 billion daily video views with 60 hours of video material uploaded to the site every minute of the day.
Technology improved over the years as well, which can especially be seen in the supported resolutions on the site. It started with resolutions of 320×240 and added higher resolution support over the years. Today, it is not uncommon to find Full HD videos on the site, and there are already videos on the site that feature 4k resolutions. Video contents are now made available as Flash video and HTML5 video, and while that is not going to change any time soon, it is likely that YouTube will eventually move away from Flash in favor of HTML5.
Google launched a new version of the YouTube application today on iOS and Android which comes with major changes to the apps' interface. Changing the interface of an app that has been around for some time is always a daunting task. It is almost guaranteed that part of the user base will dislike the change. […]
YouTube Heroes is a new volunteer program that Google just launched to make YouTube a friendlier place by reporting videos, sharing knowledge or adding subtitles to videos. YouTube is without the shadow of a doubt a toxic environment, at least when you look at the comment section on the site. While there is without doubt […]
YouTube Community is a new feature of the world's most popular video streaming site that allows content producers to interact directly with their community. One of the shortcomings of YouTube up until now was that interaction between video producers and users was severely limited. Users had options to leave comments underneath videos, and to send […]
Google tried to establish a social networking site several times in the past to complete with the almighty Facebook. But even the company's latest endeavor in the social space, Google Plus, did not work out as planned. If you consider that Google went all in that time, forcefully integrating Google Plus in many of the […]
YouTube is without doubt the most popular video hosting and streaming website on the Internet, and even though that is the case, Google did not make any money from the service last year. That's probably the main reason why Google is looking to bring other revenue models to the video hosting site. The company launched […]
Google tests a Modern Design refresh of its video streaming service YouTube currently that is going to be launched later this year if the test shows promising results. These tests, regardless of Google property they are run on, are limited to select testers or visitors only, and it is usually not possible to get in […]
Google revealed the much-anticipated subscription service YouTube Red official at an event in Los Angeles today. YouTube Red, which will launch officially on October 28, will be a subscription-based service that provides ad-free videos on YouTube to subscribers. Apart from that, members will get options to download videos for offline viewing and unlimited access to […]
Changes on YouTube are not rolled out to all users at once. Google tests them on the live site after testing them internally by enabling them for a fraction of the site's user base only to gather metrics first which it uses to measure the impact of the change on the website. The company tests […]
If you have watched a YouTube video lately you may have noticed an i icon appear in the top right corner on the site like on this video here. This is YouTube's new Cards feature that the company sees as an evolution of annotations. A click on the icon opens a card which displays additional […]
If you have been to YouTube recently and played a couple of videos on the site you may have noticed that new videos were loaded automatically at the end of the one you were just watching. While that is similar to how the playlist feature on YouTube works, it is completely different from it as […]
The video hosting site YouTube supports Adobe Flash and HTML5 Video and delivers videos based on the web browser and system used to access the site. Chrome users were defaulted to the HTML5 video player for some time now for instance while Firefox or Internet Explorer users to Adobe Flash instead for the most part. […]
Big news today for anyone who loves animated gifs and YouTube videos. Google is testing the creation of gif files on YouTube currently on select channels. Instead of having to rely on add-ons or third-party software to create those gifs, it may soon be possible to create gifs using any video hosted by YouTube directly. […]
Frames per seconds and resolution are a big deal in the gaming world and it is usually the case that the more you get the better for the gaming experience. While screen resolution is more or less self-explanatory, frames per second (fps) are not necessarily that easy to grasp. Basically, what this refers to is […]
Whenever you open a video page on the video hosting site YouTube, it starts to play from the beginning. While that is not an issue if you never opened the video before, it is one if you want to resume a video that you played before. Update: YouTube seems to have its own resume feature, […]
Google Chrome users who are regulars on Google's video hosting platform YouTube have been forced to use the HTML5 player on the website for some time now. Google provided Chrome users as well as users of other browsers a choice in this regard in the past. The HTML5 player was opt-in for example which meant […]
If you are a regular on the video hosting website YouTube, you may have had issues identifying music used in some of the videos. This is generally not a problem for single music videos, as they are properly tagged more often than not, but it is an issue for many non-music videos that get uploaded […]
