COPYCENSE

“All Chad Hurley and Steve Chen wanted to do was share some videos from a dinner party with a half-dozen friends in San Francisco. It was January, 2005, and they couldn’t figure out a good solution. Sending the clips around by e-mail was a bust: The e-mails kept getting rejected because they were so big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too. So last February the two buddies got to work in Hurley’s garage, determined to design something simpler.

“What they came up with is now called YouTube. In 11 months the site has become one of the most popular on the Net. It shows 30 million videos a day and drew 9.1 million people in February, says Web measurement service Nielsen//NetRatings. That makes the upstart one of the biggest providers of videos on the Net, ahead of Yahoo! and Google and just behind Microsoft, according to the Nielsen//NetRatings estimates.”

Heather Green. YouTube: Way Beyond Home Videos. BusinessWeek Online. April 10, 2006.

See also:

Mark Glaser. YouTube CEO Hails ‘Birth of a New Clip Culture.’ April 4, 2006.

Updates:

Dawn C. Chmielewski. Studios Not Sure Whether Web Video Innovator Is Friend or Foe. LATimes.com. April 10, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the law, business, and technology of digital content. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.