Viewing has never been better than when a person clicks onto YouTube.com. It is one of the best sites that I would recommend to anyone. Although there are some disadvantages along the way.

The web-site was first created around 2005 by former Pay Pal employees, and the headquarters of the company is based in San Bruno, California. What has made it so popular is that it allows its users (members mostly) to broadcast a wide variety of videos which is done by the use of Adobe Flash technology for viewing pleasure. The site is not profitable, and its estimated that the the bandwidth costs are about $1 million a day. Since 2007, it was estimated that YouTube covered as much bandwidth as the Internet had since 2000. Today, YouTube has 3 billion videos watched by 79 million people everyday.

Videos on Youtube which range from 10 hours that are uploaded every minute cover a wide selection of topics such as news reels, home videos, movie & trailer clips, etc. The list can go on and on. I first became fascinated with YouTube around 2007 after Richard Donner's cut of "Superman II" came out. Many fans did not like that version mostly because of the bad editing that went into creating it. As a result, many fans began posting their "own cut" of the film. This created a little skepticism for me because although their version are great, there was too much to pick from. Another example for why it has opened up debabte among who are even Superman fans.

Although their is more than that type of criticism.

The site has dealt with the issue of copywriting material when it is properly not adhered to. However, before a user posts any video, they are asked not to pose any video unless it is material which they have written themselves. Except for this problem, YouTube has been known to show unauthorized clips from TV shows or movies. Although they don't really take the time to view the material. As a result, copyright holders under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act have the authority to take down certain videos. Chief among these are lawsuits which Viacom which claimed they prevented to do this with 150,000 unauthorized videos. After these events took place, the company issued issued digital fingerprints to check up on copyright material in hopes of reducing the violation.

There has also been the blocking issues which YouTube has had to deal with such as news events in countries like Tunisia and Iran. Pakistan tried to block it when they claimed certain material offensive about Islamic beliefs, and it lead to a near global knockout of the sytem for 2 hours around February 2008. However, after the certain videos were removed, Pakistan later allowed for viewing of the web-site.

Still there are issues of certain school districts throughout the world which allow YouTube to an extent. Chief among these arguements are the certain material such as sex clips which YouTube has set the strict age limit on for viewing.

Inspite of all these issues, the issues, the website still continues to provide good video quality selection. With it's audio system which uses MP3 audio quality, YouTube has also issued High Quality video picture quality which came about around March of 2008. So as the years go by, Youtube will continue to improve.

In conclusion, YouTube has opened the doors for much in the way of viewing. In spite of the discrimination it gets, people should always have the freedom to watch whatever they want.

References: www.wikipedia.com, and youtube.com

Learn more about this author, Ryan Burton.
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