You Tube or I Tube ?

YouTube is the first video sharing web site completely free. YouTube was founded in February 2005 by three employees of PayPal : Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. Everyday, millions of internet users upload new videos on YouTube and everybody can read it. In October 2006, one and half year after the creation, Google acquired the YouTube company for $1.65 billion.

The incredible success of YouTube on the web comes from the fact that they revolutionized the method of reading videos on the web. Before YouTube, when you wanted to read a video on the web, you had to download the video on a big server or with a peer-to-peer software. It was very very long because you had to download completely the file. YouTube decided to use the Flash technology and to diffuse the video in “streaming”. So, the file size is very low and you can play the video during the download of it. That is the reason why YouTube is today a real phenomenon on the web.

The biggest problem of YouTube is of course the copyright. In fact, everybody can upload a video on YouTube in few minutes. So, if somebody upload a movie or any multimedia file else with a copyright, YouTube have to delete it automatically. However, there is so many videos to see... YouTube is often sued !