9781422277393

Like many tech startups, one cool thing about YouTube is its “do- it-yourself” origin story. It was founded in 2005 by three young soft- ware engineers from California who wanted to swap some videos they took at a dinner party. As they started to think about the possibilities of sharing videos over the internet rather than through email, their en- thusiasm for the idea began to grow. They went to work developing YouTube—first from a garage and then a small headquarters above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant in San Mateo—until it became one of the fastest-growing websites by summer 2006. Search engine giant Google scooped it up later that year for $1.65 billion, and its dominance as a video and entertainment destination has only grown from there. In this book we’ll take a deeper look at YouTube’s history, as well as some of the technology that lets you search and share videos fromall over the world. We’ll find out howYouTube is changing themedia land- scape, letting people create and share their own content and becoming a bigger part of our lives than television. We’ll also see how YouTube is used in industries outside of entertainment, such as in advertising and instructional videos, and the services YouTube’s competitors are offer- ing to gain an edge. And we’ll take a peek into what the future might have in store for YouTube, from interactive games to live-action sports. With its immense popularity and innovative approach, YouTube should be an entertainment leader for years to come.

Introduction

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