The history of YouTube.com

YouTube is a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. It's a free online video streaming service that allows users to view and share videos that have been uploaded by YouTube's members.

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Prior to PayPal, Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The domain name "YouTube.com" was activated on February 15, 2005, and the website was developed over the following months. The creators offered the public a preview of the site in May 2005, and six months later, YouTube made its official debut.

When the site began in february 2005 it was one of the very first video websites, before that it was considered foolish to create a website with only videos, because of the bandwidth costs involved.

A previous attempts was ourmedia.org backed by the servers of archive.org but the system wasn't as user-friendly as Youtube's because it involved opening two accounts, one on ourmedia and one on archive.org

The company's humble beginnings in a garage and commitment to offering free services necessitated outside financial backing. In November of 2005, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million; additionally, Roelof Botha, partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal, joined the YouTube board of directors. In April 2006, Sequoia put an additional $8 million into the company, which had experienced a boom of popularity and growth in just its first few months.

YouTube started on this ground and made a wise choice: when you upload a video, it is then converted to the relatively new Flash Video format, saving bandwidth and allowing a streaming of videos (start playing as soon as the first bits have been downloaded and continue downloading as the video is playing)

After that many other videos websites came, including big corporations such as Google Videos or Yahoo Videos, but also challengers such as DailyMotion.

And another trend has been lots of sites dedicated to playing videos, like zanyvideos, including funny, sexy, accidents, sports, etc.

Then on october 2006 Google bought YouTube for 1.6Bn in shares, that's a lot of money but Google has made a wise investment by eating its main competition

It's exactly on October 9, 2006 that it was announced that the company will be purchased by Google for US$1.65 billion in stock, which will make it Google's biggest purchase to date. The purchase agreement between Google and YouTube came after YouTube presented three agreements with media companies in an attempt to escape the threat of copyright-infringement lawsuits. YouTube will continue to operate independently, and the company's 67 employees and its co-founders will continue working within the company.

What the future holds for YouTube, only time will tell...