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YouTube

A very popular video sharing Web site that lets anyone upload short videos for private or public viewing. Founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, it was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. YouTube is another amazing Internet phenomenon with meteoric growth like Amazon.com, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and Facebook. Within a couple years, more than 25 quadrillion bytes (petabytes) of videos were being streamed from the site each month.

YouTube provides a venue for sharing videos among friends and family as well as a showcase for new and experienced videographers. Featuring videos it considers entertaining, YouTube has become a destination for ambitious videographers, as well as amateurs who fancy making a statement of some kind. In addition, YouTube emerged as a major venue for excerpts from political speeches. In the 2008 presidential campaign, videos of Barack Obama and John McCain were viewed more than two billion times according to media firm TubeMogul.

Videos are streamed to users from the YouTube site (www.youtube.com) or via blogs and other Web sites. YouTube provides code that can be embedded in any Web site page to view a specific video. See video sharing site.

Videos Are Converted to Flash
Launched in 2005, YouTube supports AVI, MOV and MPEG video formats from most digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones and recommends DivX or XviD (MPEG-4) at 320x240 resolution for best results. YouTube converts all uploaded videos to Flash video, and users must have the Flash player in their computers to play them. See Divx and XviD.