YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. Owned by Google, it is the second most visited website, right after Google itself. YouTube has more than one billion monthly users[7] who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos each day.[8] As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute.[9][10]
Type of business
Subsidiary
Type of site
Online video platform
Founded
February 14, 2005; 17 years ago
Headquarters
901 Cherry Avenue
San Bruno, California, United States
Area served
Worldwide (excluding blocked countries)
Founder(s)
Chad Hurley
Steve Chen
Jawed Karim
Key people
Susan Wojcicki (CEO)
Chad Hurley (advisor)
Industry
Internet
Video hosting service
Products
YouTube Premium
YouTube Music
YouTube TV
YouTube Kids
Revenue
Increase US$19.8 billion (2020)[1]
Parent
Google LLC (2006–present)
URL
www.youtube.com
(see list of localized domain names)
Advertising
Google AdSense
Registration
Optional
Not required to watch most videos; required for certain tasks such as uploading videos, viewing flagged (18+) videos, creating playlists, liking or disliking videos, and posting comments
Users
Increase 2.6 billion (April 2022)[2]
Launched
February 14, 2005; 17 years ago
Current status
Active
Content license
Uploader holds copyright (standard license); Creative Commons can be selected.
Written in
Python (core/API), [3] C (through IPython), C++, Java (through Guice platform), [4][5] Go, [6] JavaScript (UI)
In October 2006, 18 months after posting its first video and 10 months after its official launch, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion.[11] Google's ownership of YouTube expanded the site's business model, expanding from generating revenue from advertisements alone, to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content produced by YouTube. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads. YouTube and approved creators participate in Google's AdSense program, which seeks to generate more revenue for both parties. YouTube's reported revenue for 2020 was $19.8 billion.[12]
Since its purchase by Google, YouTube has expanded beyond the core website into mobile apps, network television, and the ability to link with other platforms. Video categories on YouTube include music videos, video clips, news, short films, feature films, documentaries, audio recordings, movie trailers, teasers, live streams, vlogs, and more. Most content is generated by individuals, including collaborations between YouTubers and corporate sponsors. Established media corporations such as Disney, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery have also created and expanded their corporate YouTube channels to advertise to a larger audience.
YouTube has had an unprecedented social impact, influencing popular culture, internet trends, and creating multimillionaire celebrities. Despite all its growth and success, YouTube has been widely criticized. Criticism of YouTube includes the website being used to facilitate the spread of misinformation, copyright issues, routine violations of its users' privacy, enabling censorship, and endangering child safety and wellbeing.
This is YouTube history
Video technology
YouTube primarily uses the VP9 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video codecs, and the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP protocol.[100] MPEG-4 Part 2 streams contained within 3GP containers are also provided for low bandwidth connections.[101] By January 2019, YouTube had begun rolling out videos in AV1 format.[102] In 2021 it was reported that the company was considering requiring AV1 in streaming hardware in order to decrease bandwidth and increase quality.[103] Video is usually streamed alongside the Opus and AAC audio codecs.[101]
At launch in 2005, viewing YouTube videos on a personal computer required the Adobe Flash Player plug-in to be installed in the browser.[104] In January 2010, YouTube launched an experimental version of the site that used the built-in multimedia capabilities of web browsers supporting the HTML5 standard.[105] This allowed videos to be viewed without requiring Adobe Flash Player or any other plug-in to be installed.[106] On January 27, 2015, YouTube announced that HTML5 would be the default playback method on supported browsers.[105] With the switch to HTML5 video streams using Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH), an HTTP-based adaptive bit-rate streaming solution optimizes the bit rate and quality for the available network.[107]
The platform can serve videos at optionally lower resolution levels starting at 144p for smoothening playback in areas and countries with limited Internet speeds, improving compatibility, as well as for the preservation of limited cellular data plans. The resolution setting can be adjusted automatically based on detected connection speed, as well as be set manually.[108][109]
From 2008 to 2017, users could add "annotations" to their videos—such as pop-up text messages and hyperlinks and which allowed for interactive videos. By 2019 all annotations had been removed from videos, breaking some videos which depended on the feature. YouTube introduced standardized widgets intended to replace annotations in a cross-platform manner, including "end screens" (a customizable array of thumbnails for specified videos displayed near the end of the video).[110][111][112]
In 2018, YouTube became an ISIN registry, and announced its intention to begin creating ISIN identifiers to uniquely identify the musicians whose videos it features.[113]
Uploading
All YouTube users can upload videos up to 15 minutes each in duration. Users can verify their account, normally through a mobile phone, to gain the ability to upload videos up to 12 hours in length, as well as produce live streams.[114][115] When YouTube was launched in 2005, it was possible to upload longer videos, but a 10-minute limit was introduced in March 2006 after YouTube found that the majority of videos exceeding this length were unauthorized uploads of television shows and films.[116] The 10-minute limit was increased to 15 minutes in July 2010.[117] Videos can be at most 256 GB in size or 12 hours, whichever is less.[114] As of 2021, automatic closed captions using speech recognition technology when a video is uploaded is available in 13 languages, and can be machine-translated during playback.[118]
YouTube also offers manual closed captioning as part of its creator studio.[119] YouTube formerly offered a 'Community Captions' feature, where viewers could write and submit captions for public display upon approval by the video uploader, but this was deprecated in September 2020.[120]
YouTube accepts the most common container formats, including MP4, Matroska, FLY, AVI, WebM, 3GP, MPEG-PS, and the QuickTime File Format. Some intermediate video
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