YouTube Opens Internet Video to the Masses

YouTube, a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, today launched its new service that allows people to watch, upload, and share personal video clips at www.YouTube.com and across the Internet.

SAN MATEO, Calif. - December 15, 2005 - YouTube, a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, today launched its new service that allows people to watch, upload, and share personal video clips at www.YouTube.com and across the Internet. As more people capture videos through digital cameras, mobile phones and other devices, YouTube makes it fast, fun and easy to broadcast those experiences worldwide.

On a typical day, YouTube already is serving more than 3 million videos, adding 8,000 video uploads and transferring 16 terabytes of data. YouTube first opened a public preview of its service in May.

"We're moving the equivalent of two Blockbuster stores every day over the Internet, and that's only a start," said Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of YouTube. "The explosion in consumer devices with video and in broadband connections is giving users control over the videos they watch and share, and YouTube is dedicated to making their experience as easy and relevant as possible."

Along with connecting users with videos from friends and family, YouTube is delivering entertaining, authentic and informative videos across the Internet. Users are documenting news events as they happen, filming quirky videos about their interests and sharing first-hand accounts of their travels.

Watch Your Favorite Videos
Anyone can watch the public videos on YouTube. They can search for videos by entering common search terms, or they can browse through videos based on channels of interest, popularity, user rankings, most recently viewed videos and featured videos selected by community recommendations.

Users also can register for a YouTube account and create a personal network of videos. Once completing a simple registration process, they are able to save their favorite videos from YouTube, create play lists of videos and connect with other users and friends and family to watch personal videos.

YouTube also supports tagging, both by letting users associate a set of keywords with the videos they upload or save in their personal networks and to browse through videos based on other users' tag designations.

Upload Your Coolest Clips
Prior to YouTube, the burden was on the user to figure out how to make videos available on the Web and to support multiple media players and hundreds of multimedia formats. Through its advanced technology infrastructure, YouTube instantly converts uploaded videos into a format viewable across the Internet without additional software uploads.

Registered users simply upload a video from their computers, and YouTube handles the conversions behind the scenes. Videos are turned into a Flash video, making them viewable through every major Web browser, including Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Flash is available to 97 percent of Internet users.

"YouTube has removed the barriers for people to move their videos off their devices and onto the Internet," said Steve Chen, a co-founder and CTO of YouTube. "As well as making it easy to upload, our advanced video-clustering and highly-scalable technology is ensuring that watching and sharing videos is fast and fun anywhere on the Internet."

Share Your Video Experiences Everywhere
Once uploaded, users can make videos public or share them only with specified users such as friends and family.

Video sharing on YouTube is not limited to www.YouTube.com. Through its video embedding feature, YouTube allows users to stream videos, both personal and public ones, across the Internet on other Web sites. For example, users can insert their favorite YouTube videos into their MySpace profiles, blogs or personal Web pages. Even as viewers watch videos across the Web, they can immediately share a video through e-mail from within the video player itself.

Using a subscription feature, registered users can subscribe to one another's videos, creating personal broadcast networks where users stay updated on the latest from their favorite video creators.

Hurley adds, "YouTube is a community motivated to watch and share videos because they can experience real life through the eyes of people like themselves, not only through the lens of traditional television."