Youtube: Owned by Google, Vine is an American video-sharing and social networking application. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim debuted it on February 14, 2005. After Google, it’s the most popular website in the world. One billion hours of video are watched on YouTube per day by more than one billion users. As of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video footage were being uploaded per minute.

YouTube was purchased by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion.

For the first time ever, YouTube isn’t only reliant on advertising; it now provides premium content such as movies and original material generated by the site itself. For those who don’t want to deal with adverts while viewing videos, YouTube Premium is an alternative. AdSense is a partnership between YouTube and Google that aims to increase income for both sides. There was an estimated $19.8 billion in revenue for YouTube in 2020.

For more than a decade now, YouTube has grown beyond its basic website to include mobile applications and the ability to connect with other platforms. Music videos, news snippets, short films, feature films, documentaries, audio recordings, movie trailers, teasers, live streams, vlogs, and other types of videos may all be found on YouTube. The vast majority of information is created by people. Collaborations between YouTubers and business sponsors are also included. To reach a wider audience, well-known media companies like Disney, Paramount, and Warner Media have launched and grown their own YouTube channels.

Popular culture, online trends and multimillionaire personalities have all been affected by YouTube. YouTube has received a lot of flak despite its meteoric rise to fame. You Tube has been criticized for its role in disseminating false information and for violating users’ privacy in everyday ways. It has also been criticized for jeopardizing children’s well-being and their safety via its usage of the internet.

History of YouTube

The beginnings of the company (2005–2006)

Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen co-founded YouTube in 2005. Since the three were all early PayPal workers, they reaped the financial benefits of eBay’s acquisition of the firm. They had both attended Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to study computer science.

In the early months of 2005, Hurley and Chen, according to a widely circulated account, devised the concept for YouTube because they had problems sharing films taken during Chen’s San Francisco apartment dinner party.

The concept that YouTube was formed after a dinner party “was certainly tremendously bolstered by marketing ideas around producing a narrative that was extremely consumable” notwithstanding Karim’s denial of the event.

The Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show incident, in which Janet Jackson’s breast was momentarily exposed by Justin Timberlake, was Karim’s motivation for YouTube, he claims.

An inability to obtain videos of the tragedy and 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami online prompted Karim to think of creating a video-sharing service.’ According to Hurley and Chen, the initial concept for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service that was heavily inspired by the site Hot or Not.

They advertised on Craigslist, offering a $100 incentive to any beautiful ladies who would post films of themselves on YouTube. [19] Due to a lack of suitable dating films, the site’s creators changed their minds and now allow video submissions of any kind.

From its inception in 2005 until 2011, the YouTube logo was prominently displayed on the site. After 2015, a different version of this logo was used sans the “Broadcast Yourself” motto.

In the beginning, YouTube was a technical start-up backed by venture money. Between November 2005 and April 2006, Sequoia Capital and Artis Capital Management invested $11.5 million and $8 million, respectively, in the firm. In San Mateo, California, YouTube’s first offices were located above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant. In February 2005, YouTube.com was launched by the corporation.

The first video was posted on 23 April 2005. Jawed Karim’s co-founder, Jawed Karim, is seen visiting the San Diego Zoo in the video titled Me at the Zoo. Public beta was introduced in May, and by November the first video to surpass one million views was an advertisement for Nike starring Ronaldinho.

On December 15, 2005, the site became live, and it was already garnering 8 million views a day at that time..  At the time, clips could only be 100 megabytes in size, which amounted to 30 seconds of video.

YouTube was not the first video-sharing site on the Internet; Vimeo was started in November 2004, but the site remained a side project of its creators from CollegeHumor at the time and didn’t expand much, either.

The Lonely Island’s “Lazy Sunday” skit was featured on Saturday Night Live during the week of YouTube’s launch. As a pioneering viral video, “Lazy Sunday” not only boosted Saturday Night Live’s ratings and long-term viewership, but it also established YouTube as a significant online destination.

By February 2006, the skit had been viewed more than five million times on YouTube before it was taken down by NBCUniversal because of copyright concerns.

Despite the fact that the skit was eventually taken down, these re-uploads of the video helped increase YouTube’s popularity and lead to more third-party content being uploaded.

More than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and the site received 100 million views per day in July 2006, according to the company.

The use of the domain name www.youtube.com caused confusion with the domain name www.utube.com. When the owner of that site, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, was regularly swamped by people searching for YouTube, he filed a lawsuit in November 2006. Since then, Universal Tube’s website has been renamed www.utubeonline.com.

From 2006 until 2013, the Broadcast Yourself period was in effect.

For $1.65 billion in Google shares, Google announced on October 9, 2006, that it had purchased YouTube. On November 13, 2006, the acquisition was completed.  As a result of Google’s acquisition, video-sharing sites like Vimeo and IAC’s new ownership of Vimeo have seen a surge in interest. The “Broadcast Yourself” tagline was coined by YouTube around this time.

From 2015 until 2017, the YouTube logo was used.Rapid expansion was seen by the business. As reported by the Daily Telegraph, in 2007 YouTube utilized more bandwidth than all of the Internet combined in the year 2000.According to comScore, the corporation had a market share of 43% in 2010 and over 14 billion video views.

Toward that goal, the corporation streamlined its website’s interface in an effort to enhance the amount of time its visitors spent there. Three billion videos were seen every day in 2011 with 48 hours of new videos being uploaded every minute. A software developer at the time estimated that just 30 percent of the movies on the site were responsible for 99 percent of the site’s views.

When the corporation redesigned its interface and added a deeper red logo in the same year, it was seen as a sign of progress.In 2013, a new interface design was implemented that unified the experience on PC, TV, and mobile devices. Over 100 hours of video were being uploaded per minute by the end of 2013, which would rise to 300 hours by November of that year.

Organizational modifications were also made during this time period. YouTube relocated to a new location in San Bruno, California, in October 2006. [55] Salar Kamangar will take over as CEO of YouTube in October 2010 after Hurley stepped aside from his position as CEO, the business stated today.

A year later in December 2009, Vevo joined forces with YouTube.Bad Romance, a video by Lady Gaga released in April of that year, surpassed the 200 million-view mark on May 9 of that year.

Tim Armstrong has been appointed as the next chief executive officer of YouTube (2014–2018).

YouTube’s new CEO, Susan Wojcicki, took over in February of this year. YouTube purchased a $215 million office park in San Bruno, California, to house its growing San Bruno headquarters. Up to 2,800 people may be housed in the project, which measures 51,468 square meters (554,000 square feet).

Using the Material Design language, YouTube’s “polymer” makeover of its user interfaces and a revised logo centered on the play button symbol were formally released in August 2017.

During this time, YouTube experimented with a variety of different approaches to monetize its service. An experimental pilot program for premium, subscription-based channels on YouTube was established by YouTube in 2013 for content creators interested in taking part.

After a brief hiatus in January 2018, this project was restarted in June, with a membership fee of $4.99 per month.

In addition to the current Super Chat feature, which was established in 2017, viewers may contribute between $1 and $500 to have their remark emphasized via the use of these channel subscriptions.

A subscription service called “Music Key” was launched by YouTube in 2014, which combined YouTube’s ad-free streaming of music content with the Google Play Music service.

As of 2015, YouTube Red, a new ad-free subscription service, was introduced, which included ad-free access to all of YouTube’s content, including original series and films made by YouTube personalities, and background streaming of material on mobile devices. YouTube Music, a new app for listening to and finding music housed on the YouTube platform, was also published by the company.

It wasn’t only the items that the corporation was attempting to target. It was in 2015 that YouTube launched a mobile app, called YouTube Kids, that was specifically targeted for children. Parental controls and a simpler UI are among the features that make this program ideal for families.

It was also in 2015 that the Amazon-owned Twitch-rivaling YouTube Gaming app was introduced as a competing video gaming vertical on YouTube.

Four people were injured and one was killed on April 3, 2018, when a shooting occurred at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California (the shooter).

Consolidation and controversy (2019–present)

More than a trillion YouTube videos were seen and 400 hours of video were uploaded per minute in February 2017, making it the most popular video platform in the world.  More than 500 hours of video were being uploaded per minute two years later.

While much of the globe was quarantined due to the COVID-19 epidemic, YouTube use skyrocketed. During the epidemic, one data company calculated that YouTube was responsible for 15% of all internet traffic.

Streaming firms YouTube and Netflix have pledged to degrade quality for at least thirty days in order to comply with EU demands that they limit bandwidth use in order to ensure medical institutions have enough bandwidth to transmit information.

When the unusual scenario arose, YouTube said that they will continue to work closely with governments and network operators throughout the world to do their bit to reduce stress on the system.

For virtue of a 2018 FTC complaint,Apple was fined $170 million for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting personal information from children younger than 13.

In addition, YouTube was told to implement measures to protect the privacy of young users. In response to concerns about its implementation of such procedures, YouTube on January 6, 2020, began considering all videos classified as “intended for children” as liable under COPPA.

A supervised mode for tweens was added to YouTube Kids in 2021 when the firm joined the app. Moreover, YouTube has launched YouTube Shorts to compete with TikTok, which lets users produce short movies to music.

During this time, YouTube was involved in legal issues with other technology businesses. There was no YouTube app for Amazon Fire devices for nearly a year between 2018 and 2019. failing to strike a deal with Google, Roku pulled YouTube TV from its streaming shop in 2020

Controversy over YouTube’s public dislike removal

YouTube discontinued the public display of hate numbers on videos in November 2021, citing that users commonly utilized the dislike tool as a form of harassment and brigading, based on their internal study.

Others said that suppressing dislikes would make it more difficult for viewers to identify clickbait or unhelpful videos, and that other measures already existed for content producers to minimize bullying, despite some users applauding the decision. YouTube Rewind 2018, widely lambasted and the most hated video on the site, may have had some effect on this change, according to some.

A dumb concept” was how YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim described the new feature, which he said was “not a good one, and one that will not be publicized.

Karim emphasized the importance of social media users being able to spot inappropriate information, saying: “We have a term for this phenomenon: the wisdom of crowds. When the platform gets in the way, the process gets messed up. As a result, the platform is almost always decrepit.”

An open-source, third-party browser plugin named “Return YouTube Dislike” was produced shortly after the announcement to re-add the dislike counter to YouTube.

Features

Video technology

VP9 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video codecs and the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP protocol are the most common ones used by YouTube. Low bandwidth connections may use MPEG-4 Part 2 streams housed in 3GP containers.

YouTube began releasing videos in the AV1 format as early as January of this year.  An AV1-enabled streaming device may be required in 2021 to save bandwidth and improve quality, reports claim.  In most cases, Opus and AAC audio codecs are delivered simultaneously with video.

When YouTube was launched in 2005, it needed the Adobe Flash Player plug-in to be installed in the browser before videos could be seen.

A prototype version of YouTube was introduced in January 2010 that exploited HTML5’s built-in video features in web browsers.  Without the need for Adobe Flash Player or any other plug-in, users were able to watch videos.

As of January 27, 2015, YouTube has made the decision to use HTML5 for all compatible browsers. Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (MPEG DASH) allows for the optimization of the bandwidth and quality for the available network while utilizing HTML5 video streams.

In places and countries where Internet connections are restricted, the platform may provide movies at potentially reduced quality levels beginning at 144p to smooth playing and make it more compatible, as well as to save data plans on mobile devices with limited bandwidth. The resolution may be chosen manually or automatically according on the observed connection speed.

Video annotations—like pop-up messages and hyperlinks—were available from 2008 to 2017 and allowed for interactive videos. Several videos relying on annotations were broken by the time they were entirely deleted in 2019. The “end screens” presented by YouTube are meant to replace annotations on all platforms (a customizable array of thumbnails for specified videos displayed near the end of the video).

When YouTube became an ISNI registry in 2018, it stated that it will begin establishing ISNI identities for artists featured in its videos.

Uploading

All YouTube users have the ability to post films of up to 15 minutes long. Verifying an account using a phone number allows users to post films up to 12 hours in length, as well as broadcast live content from their account.

Until March 2006, YouTube allowed users to submit lengthier videos, but in March of that year, the site instituted a 10-minute restriction since it discovered that the bulk of videos above this duration were illegally re-uploaded television series and movies.

In July 2010, the 10-minute time limit was raised to 15 minutes. 256 GB is the maximum video storage limit, although videos may only be 12 hours long. [106] A video may be automatically translated during playback in 13 languages using voice recognition technology by the year 2021.

As part of its Creator Studio, YouTube enables manual closed captioning.

In September 2020, YouTube will deprecate its ‘Community Captions’ function, which allowed users to develop and submit captions for public display if they were approved by the video uploader.

As far as video file types go, YouTube allows MP4, Matroska, FLV and AVI as well as the QuickTime File Format (QT). Although ProRes is generally used for post-production video editing, it is also acceptable as an intermediate video format. YouTube recommends encoding parameters.

Base64 encoded URLs include an eleven-character, case-sensitive alphanumerical Base64 string for each video, which may include numbers, characters, an underscore (_), and a dash (-). (-).

When a prepared film was launched to YouTube in 2018, a new feature called Premiere was added that notifies users when the video would be accessible for the first time, similar to a live broadcast. A two-minute countdown precedes the video’s live broadcast when it is set to air. It’s possible to begin filming a premiere right now if desired.

Format and Quality

For a long time, YouTube only supported a single video quality setting: 320240 pixels with Sorenson Spark codec (a variation of H.263) and mono MP3 audio.  Youtube introduced a 3GP video viewing option for mobile phones in June 2007.

New features in March 2008 included a high-quality option with 480×360 resolution. 720p HD support was introduced in December of 2008 as well. The YouTube player was converted from a 4:3 aspect ratio to a widescreen 16:9 at the time of the 720p debut.

YouTube started using H.264/MPEG-4 AVC as its default video compression technology with the introduction of this new feature. Support for 1080p HD video was introduced in November 2009. It was reported in July 2010 that YouTube will begin offering 4K videos, which can be seen at a resolution of 4096 x 3072 pixels. At 3840 x 2160 pixel resolution, the 4K video functionality was implemented in July 2010.

As of June 2015, films were playable at 7680 x 4320 pixels, which is 8K resolution. HLG and perceptual quantizers for HDR video were implemented in November 2016 for the first time (PQ). HDR video may be encoded in the Rec. 2020 color space.

For the first time in the service’s history, YouTube started to offer high-frame-rate videos up to 60 frames per second (as opposed to 30 frames per second). Video game footage, according to YouTube, will benefit from this since it is “motion-intensive.”

Depending on the quality of the video, you may find it on YouTube. The quality of a video can only be influenced by viewers in a limited way. Auto, which changes resolution depending on internet connection, “High Picture Quality,” which prioritizes playing high-quality video, “Data Saver,” which sacrifices video quality in favor of data use, and “Advanced,” which enables the user pick a stream resolution, are available in the mobile applications.”Auto” or a particular resolution are the options for desktop users. No matter what resolution is set, the viewer cannot directly pick a higher bitrate (quality).

Until 2009, 3D videos were only available to the general public.

] In 2015, the firm started supporting 360-degree video natively. For the first time since April 2016, 360° video may be streamed live at up to 1440p and both conventional and 360° video can be streamed at up to 4K (2160p). VR180, a new stereoscopic video format, was introduced by the firm because it believed it was simpler to create than VR360, which had a smaller user base. Users may now view any video in virtual reality using the company’s headsets.

The corporation momentarily reduced the quality of its films in response to an influx in viewers during the COVID-19 epidemic.

For the encoding of higher definition movies in 2021, the business created its own microprocessor, Argos.

Streaming Live

In 2009, YouTube streamed a U2 performance, and in February 2010, it broadcast a Q&A session with then-US President Barack Obama. Live streaming infrastructure was first tested by YouTube in September 2010 using technology provided by 3rd-party partners.  YouTube Live was launched in April of that year. Streaming live video was once restricted to a small group of companies.

It was used to stream live events like the London 2012 Olympics.  An estimated 8.5 million people tuned in to see Felix Baumgartner make his historic leap from Earth’s orbit in real time in October 2012.

Verified users with at least 1,000 subscribers were allowed to create live broadcasts in May 2013, however the requirement was decreased to 100 subscribers in August, then was abolished in December.

Live broadcasting was added to the YouTube mobile app in February 2017. In the beginning, only users with at least 10,000 subscribers were able to broadcast live through mobile, however that number was lowered to 100 by the middle of 2017. Live broadcasts are compatible with HDR, up to 4K quality at 60 frames per second, and 360-degree video.

User features

Community

Community, a social media-based feature that enables users to upload photos (including GIFs), videos, and other content in a distinct “Community” tab on their channel, was debuted on September 13, 2016, in a public test. YouTubers such as Vlogbrothers, AsapScience, Lilly Singh, The Game Theorists, Karmin, The Key of Awesome, Peter Hollens, Rosianna Halse Rojas, Threadbanger and Vsauce3 were approached before the release to identify tools Community may integrate that they would find helpful.According to [non-primary sources],

Every channel that surpasses a certain threshold in subscriber counts or already has more subscribers will immediately activate the community post function when it has been published to the public. [non-primary source required] This criterion was gradually dropped over time, from 10,000 subscribers to 1500 subscribers, to 1000 subscribers, to 500 subscribers.

Once a channel has been activated for the community tab, all of its previous conversations (referred to as “channel comments” prior to March 2013’s “One channel layout” redesign finalization”) are permanently deleted.