How did the founding idea of Youtube come about?
YouTube is a video sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States. The site was founded by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, and was acquired by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion.
Users can post, share and watch videos on the site through the site. YouTube offers videos created by both individual users and commercial media organizations using H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and Adobe Flash Video technology. There are video clips, television clips, music videos, short original videos and educational videos on the site.
YouTube history
YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. The trio were previously employed at PayPal. Hurley studied Design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
According to a recurring media story, Hurley and Chen came up with the idea for the site in early 2005, as the group wanted to post footage they had taken at a party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco online, but realized it wasn't that easy. Karim did not attend the said party and did not admit that it was actually held, but Chen said the idea for the site came up during a dinner party.
Karim stated that the first thing that inspired the site was the appearance of her breasts during Janet Jackson's 2004 American Football Final Match (Super Bawl) concert at halftime, and then the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004. Karim stated that he could not easily access the videos of these two events over the internet, and then the idea for a video sharing site was put forward. Hurley and Chen stated that the idea for YouTube was similar to an online dating site and was inspired by a site called Hot or Not.
YouTube was founded mainly thanks to the $11.5 million investment of Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006. The company's initial headquarters was located in an apartment above a pizza and Japanese restaurant in California's San Diego Zoo. The www.youtube.com domain was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the next few months.
"Me at the zoo", the first video to appear on YouTube, shows the company's founder, Jawed Karim, at the zoo. The video was uploaded to the site on April 23, 2005 and has been on the site ever since.
If you want to watch:
Jawed Karim (born October 28, 1979) is an American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur of Bangladeshi and German descent. He is a co-founder of YouTube and the first person to upload a video to the site.
The company released its first public test site in May 2005. The official publication of the site was in November of the same year. The site grew rapidly, and by July 2006, the company stated that 65,000 new videos were uploaded to the site every day and 100 million video views were generated per day on the site.
In 2014, YouTube stated that 300 hours of material are uploaded to the site every minute, which is 3 times more than the previous year. The company noted that three-quarters of the material uploaded to the site was uploaded from outside the United States. At that time, the site reached 800 million visitors per month. The bandwidth used by the site in 2007 is believed to be equal to the bandwidth used by the entire internet in 2000.
The name www.youtube.com caused the very similar website www.utube.com to encounter many problems. Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, the owner of the Utube site, filed a lawsuit against the company in November 2006, citing that the site could not handle the load and constantly crashed because people accidentally visited their site instead of YouTube. The company later changed its website address to www.utubeonline.com.
In November 2006, Google announced that it had purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion with stock and the acquisition was completed on November 13, 2006.
Google refrains from providing detailed information about YouTube's operating expenses.
In February 2015, the site announced an application developed for children using the site, and this application was called YouTube Kids. Thanks to the application, parents were able to restrict the videos that could be watched or sent. The app was available on both Android and iOS devices. On August 26, 2015, YouTube Gaming was announced. Thanks to this platform, users could present the computer or console games they played to YouTube users as live broadcasts. Also in 2015, Google announced its paid service called YouTube Red. Within the scope of this service, users would be able to both watch the content on the site without ads and download the related content to the device they use.