Online video platform facts for kids
An online video platform (often called an OVP) is like a special website or service that lets people put videos on the internet. It helps you upload, change, save, and play videos online. Think of it like a big digital library for videos!
A company that offers this service is called a video hosting service. A famous example is YouTube. You can upload all sorts of videos, from short clips to full TV shows and movies. The service stores your video on its computers (servers). Then, it gives you special links or codes so others can watch your video. These websites are often called video-sharing websites.
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What are Online Video Platforms?
Online video platforms can work in different ways. Some are like a "software as a service" (SaaS), where you pay to use their tools. Others are "do it yourself" (DIY), giving you tools to manage everything yourself. And many are "user-generated content" (UGC) models, where people like you upload videos.
OVPs give you all the tools you need to:
- Upload your videos.
- Change them into different formats (encode).
- Organize them.
- Play them back.
- Make them look good.
- Share them with others.
- See how many people watch them.
They usually have a special screen where you log in to manage your videos. They also provide a video player that you can put on your own website.
Modern OVPs often come with special tools called online video analytics. These tools show you how well your videos are doing. You can see:
- How many times your video was watched.
- How many different people watched it.
- How long people watched your video.
- Where your viewers are from.
- What they do on your site.
Some even have "video heat maps." These show you which parts of your video people watched the most, helping you make even better videos!
OVPs are connected to the "over-the-top content" (OTT) video world, which means content delivered over the internet, not traditional TV.
Different Kinds of OVPs
Online video platforms come in many sizes and with different features. Some are ready-to-use websites for individuals, like YouTube. Others are "white label" models. This means big companies or TV broadcasters can customize them to look like their own service. They use these to offer their TV shows and movies online, reaching people on computers or phones.
Usually, you pay to use the tools an OVP offers. The cost might depend on how many users you have or how complex your video needs are. For example, if you need to protect your videos with special security (DRM), it might cost more. Videos can also be changed into different formats for better delivery, sometimes using cloud computing, which can be an extra cost.
It's rare for big TV companies to build their own OVP. It can be very complicated and expensive. It's often better for them to focus on making great content instead of building the technology.
OVPs often work with other companies using something called an application programming interface (API). This lets them connect to services that help with things like:
- Changing video formats.
- Suggesting videos to viewers.
- Searching for videos.
- Managing video information.
- Analyzing video performance.
How Videos are Delivered Online
Most online video platforms use standard ways to send videos over the internet, like HTTP streaming. With HTTP streaming, videos are often sent using "adaptive streaming." This means the video service creates many versions of the same video at different quality levels. When you watch, the system picks the best quality version for your internet speed and device. If your internet slows down, it can switch to a lower quality version smoothly so your video doesn't stop.
Popular ways to do this include:
Flash is used less now because HLS and Smooth Stream work better on phones and computers. There's also a new standard called MPEG-DASH that aims to make all these different methods work together.
There are many online video platforms available on the internet today!
Why OVPs are Important
In the 2010s, as technology and the internet became a huge part of our lives, video hosting services became super important. They are like a gateway to all kinds of videos:
- Entertainment: Comedy, shows, games, music.
- News: Staying updated on what's happening.
- Documentaries: Learning about real-life topics.
- Educational videos: Helping you learn new things.
Videos can be made by everyday people (user-generated) or by big companies (commercial products). The entertainment industry uses these platforms to share music videos, movies, and TV shows directly with you.
Many people don't have their own space on the internet to store videos. So, video hosting services became very popular, especially with the rise of blogs and internet forums. Also, almost everyone has a camera phone or smartphone now, which means lots of videos are being made every day! It's much easier to upload a video to an OVP than to make a DVD to show friends. Modern broadband internet connections are great for watching videos shot on phones.
Free Video Formats
Some websites prefer video formats that don't require anyone to pay royalties (like a fee for using them). Examples include Theora (with Ogg) and VP8 (with WebM). The Wikipedia community, for example, supports the Ogg format. Some websites even let you search specifically for WebM videos.
Copyright and Privacy
Sometimes, users might share full movies by splitting them into smaller parts to fit a website's length limits. They might also try to change the movie titles so that search engines don't easily find them, but people can still recognize them. It's not always clear to a user if a video they find is breaking copyright rules.
For privacy reasons, comments made by users are usually not saved by websites that archive the internet, like Web Archive or Archive.today.
Watching Videos on Mobile Devices
More recently, video hosting services have become very important for mobile phones and tablets. This is part of "mobile web 2.0," where videos and other content can be easily sent to and watched on mobile devices.
Some video hosting services, like DaCast and Ustream, have made it possible to watch videos on mobile devices. There are also apps like Qik that let you upload videos from your phone directly to the internet. These videos are then stored online and can be shared on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. You can watch them from your phone or on a computer.
History of Online Video Platforms
Playing videos online became possible thanks to big improvements in how videos are compressed (made smaller). Without compression, video files are huge! For example, a standard definition video would need a super-fast internet connection of 168 megabits per second, and a full HD video would need over 1 gigabit per second!
The most important math trick that made video hosting possible is called the discrete cosine transform (DCT). This method helps make video files much smaller without losing too much quality. It was first thought of in 1973. The DCT is the basis for the first useful video coding format called H.261 in 1988. After that came even more popular DCT-based video formats like MPEG and H.26x standards from 1991 onwards. A similar trick, the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), is also used for MP3 music files (from 1994) and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) (from 1999).
Early Video Hosting Sites
The very first internet video hosting site was ShareYourWorld.com, started in 1997. It let people upload video clips or full videos in different file types. However, internet speeds and video processing technology back then were not very good. So, it couldn't stream videos smoothly like YouTube does today. ShareYourWorld closed in 2001 because of money and internet speed problems.
In October 2004, Pandora TV from South Korea became the first video sharing website in the world to put ads on user videos. It also gave users unlimited space to upload their own videos.
Video Streaming Platforms Grow
YouTube was started by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen in 2005. It used new technology to change video formats, which made it possible to stream videos uploaded by users from anywhere on the internet. This worked by using a Flash player with MPEG-4 AVC video and AAC audio. This meant you could upload any video format, and YouTube would change it into a Flash-friendly video that could be streamed easily. The very first YouTube video clip was Me at the zoo, uploaded by Jawed Karim in April 2005.
YouTube quickly became the most popular online video platform and changed how videos were shared online. YouTube's success led to many other online video streaming platforms, like Netflix, Hulu, and Crunchyroll.
When you use these video streaming platforms, there are sometimes concerns about privacy. These websites might collect information about what you watch, how often you buy things, or what types of videos you like. They use this information to show you ads or understand your online habits.
Images for kids
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A robot for kids.
See also
- Comparison of video hosting services
- Flash Video ("Flash")
- Fliggo
- List of online video platforms
- Online video analytics
- Streaming media
