What is YouTube?
YouTube is the biggest and best know video-sharing website in the world. It is now owned by Google and in the UK 2.4 billion videos were viewed on YouTube in April 2009. It enables you to upload and share videos up to 10 minutes in length.
Why use YouTube?
It is by far the easiest way of publishing and distributing short videos online. You could email videos (as files) to a group or mailing list, but video files can get very large and the attachments could be blocked. If you have a website you could upload the video once and people could download the file and not block up their inbox, but this relies on space on your server and you could end up paying extra for lots of downloads. Better still you could upload your video to YouTube (which has very fast, very big servers with lots of space) and people can view your video without having to download the file, just by viewing it in their browser. YouTube can also help build a community outside of your website by engaging with other YouTube users through tagging, groups, and commenting.
Privacy
Normally YouTube videos are public but you can post videos that are private and then email a special link ot up to 25 people.
Copyright
You should only post content to YouTube that is yours- ie no TV recordings even using music as a background can infringe the copyright of the original artist
How much does it cost?
YouTube is free to upload and create channel pages, even HD videos, the only real limitation is the 10 minute length of clips.
Comments, ratings and popularity
YouTube videos have comments enabled providing users a way of feeding back about the videos or just rating it out of 5 stars. This means that with more viewings a video can become more popular, but it needs to be promoted by tagging, but also being embedded in other places like blogs.
Going viral
YouTube videos are uploaded once but can be viewed in a number of ways, either by passing on a link in an email, or embedding the video in another website. It’s this ease of passing on which can quickly cause a video to explode in popularity or ‘go viral’ eg. Susan Boyle outside the UK quickly became a phenomenon even though people had not seen the original broadcast.
Groups
You can create or join groups so share videos on certain topics or locations, building up a network of relevant users who view, comment and post videos
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