YouTube, formed in 2005 by three ex- PayPal employees, is a video-sharing website. It is one of the subsidiaries of Google. Google bought YouTube for US$1.65 billion in November 2006. It’s headquarter is positioned in San Bruno, California, United States. It uses technologies like H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, WebM and Adobe Flash Video to display varieties of user-generated and company media video. YouTube let users view, upload and share videos.
Individuals have uploaded most of the content of YouTube. Media conglomerate like CBS, the BBC, Hulu etc. offer some of their material through YouTube. This activity is a part of YouTube partnership plan. YouTube contents include music videos, video and TV clips. Its content also includes video blogging, brief creative and instructive videos. Registered users are allowed to upload videos. Unregistered users can not upload videos but they have access to watch videos only. Videos which contain unpleasant content can be watched by only the registered users if they are 18 years old.
YouTube – Popular video-sharing website
History:
Hurley, Chen, and Karim founded YouTube. They all were past employees of PayPal. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen developed the idea of YouTube in 2005 after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment. But according to Jawed Karim, the idea of creating YouTube came from Janet Jackson’s role in Super Bowl incident in 2004. Hurley and Chen said that they were motivated by the website “Hot or Not”. However, YouTube was invented from difficulty of sharing video
YouTube started its journey initially from $11.5 million investment between November 2005 and April 2006. The investment was made by Sequoia Capital. On 14 February, 2005, the domain name of YouTube www.youtube.com was activated. The website was developed over the succeeding months. YouTube’s early headquarter was in San Mateo, California.
Educational Benefits of YouTube
Using YouTube video can help education sector greatly. YouTube can be used as online space for the students to show their individual work. It can be a powerful educational tool in order to motivate students. Student can get materials of class from YouTube. YouTube can be used to express opinion of a group on a particular topic. Thus, everyone can be benefitted by gaining knowledge. Instead of traditional writing, students can submit video presentation. This will help learners by improving visual literacy. Teachers may supply instructional videos to the learners. YouTube video can be used to train up people. By implementing YouTube video in the classroom, teachers can improve students’ attention as well as teachers can present things to students accurately and flexibly.
Advantages of YouTube:
YouTube’s privacy features are user friendly. Video sharing via YouTube is fast and easy. Browsing through YouTube is safe. YouTube’s rating and feedback system is easy.
Disadvantages of YouTube:
One disadvantage of YouTube is lack of parental controls. Video length is limited. There is no restriction on comments. One of the disadvantages of YouTube is limited copyright intrusion notices.
