YouTube

**YouTube** is a website owned by Google LLC where users can upload their own videos. It was founded on February 14, 2005, at Midnight ET, technically launched after Google Maps and has become very popular across the world.

YouTube's channel has different versions depending on your country. Installments of YouTube rewinds are uploaded on the United States Version. Attempting to view another country's channel will result in getting directed to your country's version.

YouTube is a free service, but like other content-sharing websites, YouTube imposes time restrictions for its video uploaders to prevent flooding the site with high-volume traffic. For this reason, users on the platform often use services that allow them to download videos to watch offline.

## Information

YouTube has over 2 billion users, it is one of the top online sites, and it has an Alexa ranking at number 2. The site has several features, such as subscribing to users whom you like, this is also known as subbing or subs. Favorite videos are those which you can save on your channel page and come back and watch at a later time. YouTube is one of the best online sites that are free, the only catch is that you must join to like, dislike, comment and upload which is free and that copyrighted, offensive or inappropriate material, etc. may be removed.

   YouTube initially only streamed uploaded videos in one resolution: 240p. Over time, it started processing newly uploaded videos in higher resolutions. Today, YouTube supports the following resolutions 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1440p, 2160p, 2880p and 4320p. YouTube processes uploaded videos in their source resolutions, as well as the resolutions lower than that. Resolutions 720p and up support 60fps, if the uploaded video is in that framerate. The same goes for 50fps. 1080p and 1440p are labelled as HD, while 2160p and 4320p are labelled as 4K and 8K, respectively. In the beginning of YouTube's history, most videos were encoded in MPEGLA's x264 format. However, current videos are now encoded in the Alliance of Open Media's VP9 and AV1 codec technology, of which Google/YouTube is a major contributor to.

Music, Gaming, And Sports are all YouTube Generated Channels. They technically are the most subscribed channels but due to them being auto-generated, it doesn't count.

## Ownership

YouTube was purchased by Google on November 13, 2006. Some say it has changed some of YouTube's policies through most of the site continues to work the same.

## New Features

Several new features have been added to YouTube in the following years.

* **Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down** - This is a rating system used to rate comments that are liked by users or disliked, these can be seen on videos that allow the thumbs to be on it. By November 10, 2021, the dislike count was removed from videos to "protect creators' mental health" and "reduce dislike attacks" prompting a negative response from the community.
* **Insight** - This is a feature that tells you about your video, such as ratings, where it was viewed, how popular it is, and other new breakdowns upon views such as where the most viewers are from.
* **Audio Swap** - This is a feature that will allow you to add or change the sound on your videos.
* **Annotations** - This was a feature that allowed you to add notes on certain spans of your videos. As of May 2017, it was being deprecated due to its low usage and by January 15, 2019, the existing annotations that were placed before the discontinuation of annotations in 2017 were entirely removed, and it was replaced by the End Screens.
* **HD** (high-definition)
* **Widescreen** (16:9 or 4:3)
* **Channels Beta** - A new style of channels that have been extremely unpopular with many YouTube users.
* **Ban from YouTube button** - This is a small feature used to 'ban' a specific user from viewing or watching a YouTuber's content. Only YouTubers that have 100,000 subscribers have this button.
* **End Screens** - Features cards (video, playlist, subscribe, channel) that can be accessible by both computers, mobile, and TV. It, along with Cards, replaced the Annotations in 2017.
* **Cards** - It can be seen by an "i" in a circle on the top-right of the playback video, and can feature (but not limited to) links to channels, and external links.
* **YouTube Studio Beta** - Implemented in 2019, it includes a cleaner, more complex version of the Video Manager, Dashboard, Upload, and more.

## Trivia

* The official YouTube channel's join date was once December 31, 1969 oddly enough, though the actual join date was sometime between July 20-22, 2004.
* Currently, the YouTube channel page does not show a joining date at all, despite using the channel page layout that would normally show a joining date.
* 2018 Rewind has the highest number of dislikes of YouTube, becoming the most disliked video in 6 days and having over 19 million dislikes as of August 2021.
* The YouTube Spotlight channel interacts with its viewers frequently on the community tab of their channel.
* They are the only non-user generated most subscribed channel.
* YouTube Spotlight had the most followers on Google+ before it had a shutdown in 2019. The second most followed is Google+ itself.

## References

1. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20130203200319/http://www.youtube.com/user/YouTube
2. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20100616095234/http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=3D&view=subscribers
3. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20100616094101/http://www.youtube.com/user/arnito
4. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20100612070831/http://www.youtube.com/user/savioshow