• former employees created YouTube in February 2005

By Leo Townsend

Web 2.0 Environments

• created by former employees created YouTube in February 2005. •The first YouTube video was entitled Me at the zoo, and shows founder Jawed Karim at San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site•It is estimated that 13 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire internet in 2000.

•Copyright Issues•YouTube's video playback technology for web users is based on the Adobe Flash Player.•accepts videos uploaded in most formats, including .AVI, .MOV, MPEG, .MP4, DivX, .FLV, and .OGG. It also supports 3GP, allowing videos to be uploaded directly from a mobile phone.•The normal quality videos have a resolution of 320x240 pixels and have been in use since the launch of the site in 2005, while the high quality videos launched in March 2008 have a resolution of 480x360 pixels

•The MPEG-4 videos can be played by adding "&fmt=18" to the web address of a video•In late November 2008, YouTube changed the aspect ratio of its web video player from the traditional 4:3 to the widescreen 16:9.•It was also announced in November 2008 that YouTube now offers some of its videos in true HD format, with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels.

•I have been a member of youtube since june 2006. •7,000 videos•I think youtube is great as it encourages specific interests. Opposed to television, user can choose what they choose to watch, rather than being fed programs.•Another great feature of youtube is the subscriptions. Instead of watching videos which the youtube programmers recommend, you can watch videos that you favorite broadcasters have uploaded or videos that people with similar interests have added to their favourite videos list.

•Youtube is also great to have discussions on basically any topic you like. The comments panel allow you to voice your opinions on the videos, and youtube has a relatively new system where you can either give people a thumbs up or a thumbs down depending on whether you agree on what they say. Once comments receive more than 6 thumbs down, the comment is hidden, which is a very effective way of blocking spamming or inappropriate comments.

•Another interesting thing about youtube is its ability to create stars from nothing. Something so simple as someone speaking into their webcam about something or other, can attract up to 30,000 subscribers and millions of views. The first main example of this was a teenage blogger lonelygirl15, who got so many subscribers to hert channel she now gets paid well to create her videos as she has merchandise and advertising.