MS Technology Vocabulary YouTube
Lydia Liu
January 2009
Computer 7-5
YouTube
INTRODUCTION
YouTube is a widely-used, video-sharing website that allows people of all ages, computer-savvy or not, to upload and view videos submitted by other users. Although the site was launched on February 15, 2005, as of summer 2008, over 5 billion videos have been viewed worldwide, making it the third most visited website. Most videos people may see are uploaded from the general public, but several media organizations, such as BBC and CBS, offer some of their current news on the website as well.
Technical Notes
YouTube's video playback technology for web users is based on the Adobe Flash Player. Videos uploaded to YouTube are limited to ten minutes in length and a file size of 1 GB. When YouTube was launched in 2005, it was possible for any user to upload videos longer than ten minutes. The ten minute limit was introduced in March 2006, after YouTube found that the majority of videos exceeding this length were unauthorized uploads of television shows and films, causing many copyright claims to be filed out.
YouTube's videos are distributed through streaming media technology in a range of formats, with the video and audio quality dependent on the platform. YouTube's website interface offers users the choice of two quality levels, normal and high, both of which are based on the Flash Video container format. 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. YouTube chooses which videos are made available in the high quality format by analyzing the quality of the uploaded videos.
In June 2008, YouTube launched a beta test of Annotations, which can display notes or links within a video. Annotations are a way for the submitter to add extra information, such as comments and links to other videos, to the actual video for a set amount of time. Initially, annotations would not appear on videos embedded outside the YouTube website, but as of August 2008, it is now available on embedded movies.
Content Accessibility
Each YouTube video is accompanied by a piece of HTML markup which can be used to link to the video or embed it on a page outside the YouTube website, unless the submitter of a video chooses to disable the feature. These options are especially popular with users of social networking sites, such as MySpace, Google Chat, and Facebook. YouTube videos can also be accessed via a gadget which is available for the iGoogle homepage.
Modern Uses
Due to the recent election, YouTube has also functioned as one of the campaign advertisements (to see Barack Obama’s page click here: http://www.youtube.com/user/barackobamadotcom?blend=1.) From John McCain (http://www.youtube.com/user/johnmccaindotcom?blend=1) to Taylor Swift (http://www.youtube.com/user/taylorswift?blend=1) to the English monarchy (http://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalChannel), all generations of singers and politicians have YouTubes.
http://wiki.sjs.org/wiki/index.php/MS_Technology_Vocabulary Media:Example.ogg
