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 Information About YouTube
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About YouTube:
YouTube is a popular free video sharing Web site which lets users upload, view, and share video clips.
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| Type: |
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Private |
| Founded: |
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February 2005 |
| Headquarters: |
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San Mateo, California, USA |
| Key people: |
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Chad Hurley, Founder & CEO
Steve Chen, Founder & CTO
Jawed Karim, Founder & Advisor |
| Industry: |
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Internet services |
| Employees: |
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67 (2006) |
| Owner: |
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Google |
| Slogan: |
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Broadcast Yourself |
| Website: |
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www.youtube.com |
YouTube was founded by three former PayPal employees, who, witnessing the boom of online grassroots video, realized the need for a decent service that made the process of uploading, watching and sharing videos hassle-free. They registered the domain YouTube.com on February 15th, 2005 and developed the site over the following months from a garage in Menlo Park. In May 2005 they launched in a public beta, and in November, YouTube made its debut with an $3.5 million of funding from Sequoia Capital.
In October 2006, Google, Inc., announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for $1.65 billion USD in Google's stock. The deal closed on 13 November 2006.
YouTube's video playback technology is based on Macromedia's FlashPlayer 7 and uses the Sorenson Spark H.263 video codec. This technology allows YouTube to display videos with quality comparable to more established video playback technologies (such as Windows Media Player, Realplayer or Apple's Quicktime Player) that generally require the user to download and install a small piece of software called a browser plug-in in order to watch video. Flash itself requires a plug-in, but the Flash 7 plug-in is generally considered to be present on approximately 90% of Internet-connected computers. Alternatively, users can use a number of websites to download the videos to their own computers. The use of Flash video was most likely a key component of YouTube's success, allowing viewers to watch video instantly without installing software or dealing with a common problem experienced with other Web video technologies -- incompatible or varying versions of video players.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "YouTube".
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