Internet video

Internet video is the general field that deals with the transmission of video over the Internet. Internet video exists in several formats; most notably AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition), FLV (Flash Video Format) and MPEG-4 Part 14 (MP4). Current online video exists through several mediums, the most popular being YouTube which has over a billion unique users visit each month. However, there are other video platforms, such as Vimeo, which are also popular. Adding to this, in recent years, the platform of internet video has been used to stream live events. As a result of the popularity of online video streaming, important events, such as the 2012 Presidential debates, have been streamed live on the internet for people to see. Aside from this, internet video has played an important role in the music industry as a medium to watch music videos and gain popularity for songs.

AVCHD, or Advanced Video Coding High Definition, uses one of the more efficient video coding formats. It was announced in May 2006 and since then has grown into a high-quality video format that can compete with other professional forms of media. The AVCHD is geared towards consumer shooters; this is largely because the AVCHD format capitalises on the H.264/MPEG-4 video that is able to compress video to smaller sizes in order to allow more video to be stored in the same storage capacity.

Flash Video, or FLV, is encoded video by Adobe Flash software in order to play within the Adobe Flash Player. It is the most common sharing format on the internet today. It is estimated that 99% of users have flash installed on their browser. The majority of video sharing websites stream videos in Flash, most notably YouTube.

MPEG-4 is known as a sharing format for the internet. In recent years an increasing number of camcorder and cameras began employ it. Moreover, YouTube recommends using the MP4 Format (Although they accept multiple formats, YouTube either converts them to .flv or .mp4 files). Apple is another company who has strongly backed MP4 by using it in their Quicktime player.

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. The three registered YouTube on 15 February 2005. In October 2005, Nike became the first major company to embrace YouTube as a promotional platform. They were the first company to do this and since then YouTube has provided a means of displaying internet video in order to help companies promote their products. Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006 and since then it has developed it even further. Since then, it has become the most popular website for watching internet video. For example, the hours of video watched per month on YouTube totalled 6 billion. Moreover, as of 2014, there were one billion unique users to YouTube each month. Adding to this, according to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults aged 18–34 years old than any cable network.

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