Youtube India--"THE JOURNEY OF YOUTUBE"

The popular video-sharing website YouTube has launched its local Indian version in.youtube.com Google’s desi version of YouTube is sure to send jitters down the competition’s spine with its localized home page plus search functions.

An initiative that is set to benefit students, YouTube India is reaching directly to Indian students, as Google India has tied up with Indian Institute of Technology for uploading classroom lectures for free.

"Companies like YouTube or an agency which has a large bandwidth and storage is helping us for free for distribution and disseminations and it is an enormous cost savings for us," said Dr Mangala Krishnan, Professor, IIT, Chennai.

Google India is also joining hands with media partners around the country to establish revenue sharing programs.

"With YouTube now monetizing their content and sharing their revenues with partners like us in a very transparent way. It has opened up a completely new revenue stream for content owners and partners like us," said Rajat Barjatya, MD, Rajshri Media.

Google India is working on monetizing plans where anybody can earn money from their uploaded content.

"Certainly we are interested in investigating ways to bring multiple ways to our partners and customers to monetize their presence in digital world in India as well," said Shailesh Rao, CEO, Google India.

Few years back Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock and the internet giant says to sustain its leading position it is open to acquisitions of similar platforms in India too.

Youtube--A closer look -'History'

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid-February 2005 by three former PayPal employees(Steve Chen,Chad Hurley,Jawed Karim).The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006.

Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Some videos are available only to users of age 18 or older (e.g. videos containing potentially offensive content). The uploading of videos containing pornography, nudity, defamation, harassment, commercial advertisements and material encouraging criminal conduct is prohibited. Related videos, determined by title and tags, appear onscreen to the right of a given video. In YouTube's second year, functions were added to enhance user ability to post video 'responses' and subscribe to content feeds.

The Wall Street Journal published an article revealing that YouTube was hosting about 6.1 million videos (requiring about 45 terabytes of storage space), and had about 500,000 user accounts. As of April 9, 2008, a YouTube search returns about 83.4 million videos and 3.75 million user channels.

Some interesting Facts about Youtube

• YouTube was the number one video site on the Internet as of January - with 67.5 million unique users in the U.S., according to Nielsen NetRatings.
• The site also was the 6th largest Internet destination overall, Nielsen determined. People watch hundreds of millions of videos a day on the service.
  
• Every minute, 10 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
• Of the 9.5 billion online videos watched in the U.S. in November last year, 2.9 billion of those were watched on YouTube, according to Comscore.
• It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.

The "Evolution of dance" has been the most viewed video so far in Youtube's history.