YouTube
Founder(s): Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley
Year founded: 2005

Meta Description
Hosts user-generated videos. Includes network and professional content.

Background
Steve and Chad originally met at PayPal. They both joined the company during its early startup days. After PayPal was acquired by eBay they parted and pursued other projects. Reconnecting 2 years after the acquisition they began hashing out ideas for a new startup. They brainstormed and analyzed various market opportunities and decided to focus on video on the web. The moment that sparked the idea for YouTube came in January 2005 during a friend’s dinner party. Steve and Chad had filmed several videos on a digital camera, but then found it difficult to share the videos with their friends. Neither Steve nor Chad had experience with video on the web, but this was a problem they were interested in solving.

Problem(s)
Uploading and sharing video on the web was a painful experience. Flickr, a free photo hosting and sharing web application was extremely popular at the time. However a similar tool for sharing and hosting video did not exist. The proliferation of portable digital cameras led to the creation of a lot of video, but people had no way to easily post those videos online to share with others. From a technical execution perspective, video files take up a lot of disk space and come in a variety of formats (MP4, AVI, MPEG, etc.). It is a big technical challenge to re-encode all of these video types into a single format in order to give users an optimal video upload and playback experience. Plus, a large amount of servers and bandwidth is needed to host and stream all the videos.

Solution
YouTube became a free site where users can watch, upload, and share their videos easily and quickly. The invention of real-time transcoding to Flash video was a key technological innovation. Users could upload a wide range of video file types and they would all be converted to Flash. This meant users could watch videos on their browser without downloading any software or plugins. Users didn’t even need to register for an account to watch videos. Furthermore, Flash players bearing the YouTube logo could be embedded on websites, which helped spread the YouTube brand. Many users added links to YouTube videos on their MySpace page. This allowed YouTube to piggyback on MySpace’s ascendance into the mainstream.

The original vision for YouTube was a video version of “hot or not”, essentially a video dating site. However users began to upload clips on a wide range of topics (funny, dancing, sports, movie clips, etc). Following the users lead, the founders broadened the vision of YouTube to focusing on clips and speed. The focus was to empower users to upload and share clips quickly in order to build a massive video library.

The product was being built for users, not broadcasters. For example in the early days the founders did not force users to sit through pre-roll ads even though they could have used the revenue to offset server and bandwidth costs. Features like search, commenting, and profiles were only added after users demanded them. The company culture of listening to users helped build a massive and dedicated community around the product. Combined with its ease of use and speed, YouTube was able to amass a huge video library to become the leading host for user-generated video.

Source(s)
The Youngsters Behind YouTube
Foundation 29 // Chad Hurley
The YouTube Gurus