Video hosting is a web service that allows you to download and view videos in a browser , for example, through a special player . However, most of these services do not offer video by following this way the principle of ” content generated by users » ( the User-generated content ). Video hosting began to gain popularity along with the spread of broadband Internet access and the development (cheapening) of hard drives (on which it became possible to store huge amounts of information for a long time).
Specialization
A large number of video hosting sites thematically do not limit their content . However, some video hosting companies occupy specialized sectors, offering thematic portals. A special place is occupied by SciVee – a service for publishing scientific and popular science video content, as well as textual research results in addition to it.
Legal Aspects
While some sites have tight controls on uploaded video files (for example, on Wikimedia Commons , where a lot of free videos are stored), many video hosting companies experience problems due to the fact that users upload video clips without being their copyright holders . So, lawsuits are brought up against YouTube from time to time, in which producers of music videos, films or television series demand compensation from Google (the owner of the service).
Volume and traffic growth rates
At the end of 2007, YouTube traffic https://topvideos4u.info/ exceeded the total Internet traffic in the United States in the 2000 sample. At the end of 2008, YouTube and Hulu exceeded this figure twice .
According to Cisco , the volume of video traffic in North America and Europe in October 2008 reached the level of the total traffic of the entire Internet as of October 2001 . According to comScore estimates, more than one hundred billion minutes of online video are consumed per month in North America, the UK, France, and Germany.
YouTube comes in first with monthly traffic, with a mark of 31 petabytes (31 million gigabytes) per month, followed by Hulu with 17 petabytes . It took YouTube more than a year to reach 15 PB, while Hulu went through this stage in 7 months, which underlines the pioneering role of the YouTube service .
Cisco observers believe that video hosting has greatly changed the role of a webcam – with the spread of unlimited broadband Internet access, for many, it opened a window to the “other room”. So, in two months in 2008, visitors to ustream .tv watched more than five million hours of video recordings of puppies known as Shiba Inu Puppy Cam . This volume is equal to the number of hours spent by sports fans on ESPN .com video sites over the same period, and the used traffic (620 terabytes) exceeded 15 times the traffic of the entire Internet in the USA in one month of 1994