Kevin J. Delaney at kevin.delaney@wsj.com from the Wall Street Journal had a piece on how YouTube was able to become more popular than Google Video, MSN Video etc:
“It stood out from the growing corps of online video services, including an offering from Google, for its simplicity. YouTube serves up videos from its Web site directly or from other sites where people insert them, generally not requiring users to download any special software. To accomplish this technical feat, YouTube drew on open-source software and wrote its own code. The service can handle about 110 video formats and 64 audio formats used by digital photo and video cameras and cellphones.”
Now both Yahoo and Google has improve their service and matched YouTube’s uploading interface. But the popularity of YouTube as a web destination has already being established. Even big Hollywood companies are starting to use YouTube to distribute short films and TV clips.