Class Project YouTube

ITU Cloud Computing Programing Assignment2, Isamu Shigemori

1. Introduction

Founded in February 2005, YouTube is the world's most popular online video community, allowing millions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.

So Youtube can be called as SaaS (Software  as a Service) for video service. All software is stored at server-side. Most of users just watch videos through web browsers or from smart phone. Each video basically has its own URLs, so users can share the videos by exchanging their URLs.

The videos which can be watched in it are the ones that YouTube users uploaded. To upload videos which are several kinds of video format files; the users first create their YouTube accounts and login to the site. The users who logged in successfully can upload videos

2. View videos

Viewing or watching videos, you just need to put the URLs to your browser. For example, the image below is the typical webpage of YouTube:

You can go to the page by simply clicking the URL below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwEfRCeNc6Y

Or you can search the video from the keywords, "cerebral palsy walking".

You can click this Hopefully, my video is at the top of the list.

3. Upload videos

As I mentioned above, we can put our videos after creating and logging our account. To have an account in YouTube means to have our own channel in YouTube. It's like homepage. My channel is

isamush01's channel (Please click)

You can see all videos I have uploaded here.

Videos being uploaded should be less than 10 minutes long. It says most of video format are accepted. More precisely,

YouTube converts the videos uploaded to several formats to fit to types of clients. For example, it gives flash version for PC-web clients. I think that this is the main feature of YouTube.

We also can edit the uploaded videos putting title, description, and category is required, but also record time and place. We can replace the sound to some music, too.

Here is the video how to upload

3. As community site

YouTube has also been designed as a community site in which the users communicate each other. There are several ways to do it:

• View count: This number indicates how many people have watched the video.

• • ,

  • View is used as a indicator to indicate how popular the video is.

• Comments: Users can put comments on the video of others.

• Favorite videos: Users can pick the videos they like and put the videos into their own channel page.

• Subscription / Subscribers: Users can subscribe others' channels. They are notified by email if the user upload something new.

4. Put Videos on web site

YouTube also allows users to put the videos into other websites through given source code. For example, I can get the following html code:

I just embedded this below:

This is very useful feature for users, and a smart way to get more viewers to YouTube.

5. API for Developers

YouTube is also providing API to developers to embed YouTube videos and other features into web sites and client devices. I'm not going into the details, but there are two kinds of APIs. One is Data API, which is for usual administration like uploading a video, or putting comments. Another is Player API, which controls playing videos, and can be used embedded devices.

6. Closing Note

As we went through the features of YouTube, I found  that YouTube is not just a popular website, but also it has lots of administration and video player features. And I can see it as Software rather than web pages, which can be called as Cloud Computing.