Youtube

Started in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chan, Youtube is currently world’s most popular video sharing website. From video clips of cats fighting with dogs shot with cellphones to professionally produced movie trailers, the site hosts it all. According to Google, which bought the website in 2006, over 800 million users visit YouTube every month, over three billion hours of videos are watched every month and over 72 hours of video content is uploaded every minute. In the recent years, the website has tried to attract more professional video content producers. It has tied up with several Hollywood studios and gives people a share in the advertisement revenue if they sign up for the Youtube partner programme to produce exclusive content for the website. With its reach and popularity, it has also emerged as a repository of first-person account. For example in the case of 2011 tsunami in Japan, videos shot by amateur people appeared on Youtube minutes after the disaster. At the same time, its growing popularity has forced it to deal with several contentious issues like copyright infringement, which is considered to be rampant on the website as users often upload copied video content without any regard for the rights of original producers.