What is video hosting for a simple consumer is, first of all, an opportunity to have a good time watching your favorite videos on various topics. You can choose a list of bloggers you are interested in, receive regular notifications about the release of new videos, keep abreast of the latest events and everything new that appears in society. For those who have decided to purposefully start producing interesting media content, video hostings provide a huge range of opportunities, and most importantly, a target audience that will provide income from the number of video views and advertising.

The history of YouTube
The YouTube video platform was created on February 14, 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steven Chen and Javed Karim.
Below is the very first posted video on YouTube, from which testing of the site began. It was added by creator Javed Harim himself on April 23, 2005.

The goal of the project was originally as follows: the creators wanted to enable other people to publishinteresting videos and send them to your friends. It was also considered a special innovation that users could rate the video by clicking "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". Previously, in order to send a video to a friend, you had to do it through mail, paid video hosting sites or the Bit-torrent program. It was extremely inconvenient. Since the maximum size of the sent video was strictly limited, and it was possible to watch it only after it was fully downloaded.
Hurley, Kim and Chen managed to solve all these problems, thereby satisfying all the needs of the user. This explains the resounding success of YouTube video hosting, because the idea itself is not as important as its implementation.

Best Video Hosting Sites on the Internet
Rutube is the second most popular video hosting in Russia after YouTube, made in its own image and likeness. Of the minuses, one can only note insufficient optimization, a too simplified and heavy video player, but the developers are actively working to improve the platform. The hosting is located at rutube.ru, it has not only a Russian-speaking audience, but also the CIS countries and even Western Europe.
The "Clipki" video hosting is located at clipiki.tv, the authors usually upload full-length films or TV shows there, as they are very popular there. Short videos are not as popular with the majority as, in principle, the service itself. Most likely, users love this video hosting only because they can watch various films in good quality.
Coub joke video hosting is located at coub.com and specializes mainly in short videos of an entertaining nature. Users do not have to search for a topic of interest to them for a long time, there are sections on the left side of the screen, by going to which you can find the required information. Video hosting is quite popular, videos can sometimes gain an average of 500-600 thousand views.

The Russian-language media platform ivi.ru with paid movies is a kind of Internet TV platform for watching movies not only on computer screens, but also on large plasma screens. The site provides an opportunity to watch almost any Russian and foreign films on a paid subscription, including those released a very long time ago. The site also has series and cartoons for children, you can search by genre, year of release, popularity and other parameters.
Opportunities
What is video hosting for creative people? If you are a creative person who needs self-expression, then, of course, video hosting is suitable for you as a platform with a sufficient set of video editing and processing tools. Also, video hosting makes it possible to earn on views and advertising. Popular videos can bring in serious income and relieve a person of the need to have a stable job. You can shoot anything. Most platforms have a real-time video recording function, which is suitable for game streaming or just chatting with viewers.
Users are also not deprived of usefulfunctions, such as searching for content by selected parameters, rating videos, commenting, sending to other web services, and much more. Recently, streaming of TV channels and recordings of various TV shows have begun to appear on video hosting sites.

Attendance
You can write a description of video hosting sites, their capabilities and advantages indefinitely, but perhaps the most important criterion for evaluating any media platform is its attendance. Today, Youtube is the undisputed leader, but there are many other services, such as Rutube, Vimeo, Myspase or Metacafe. The last three are more popular among foreigners. Also, social networks that provide the opportunity to publish video cannot be discounted.
Platform attendance affects the quality of content, since, if monetization is possible, authors prefer sites with a larger audience. For a simple user, this is also very important, no one wants to watch videos in poor quality or adapt to the few content that video hosting offers.
Most Popular Videos

The record of views of one video by the number of times for all time belongs to YouTube. Despasito's music video is in first place with 5.86 billion views, followed by Shape of you (3.99 billion), See You Again (3.94 billion) and Uptown Funk (3.91 billion). It is especially pleasant that the top five most viewed YouTube videos includethe release of the Russian cartoon "Masha and the Bear - Masha plus porridge", which scored 3.39 billion views. It is noteworthy that this cartoon is the only non-music video among all the most popular videos.
What is video hosting for business?
Every video platform that has a long existence on the Web, more or less tolerable popularity, should receive income. Earnings occur through advertising integration into the video, or into the pages of the site. The importance of video hosting for any campaign cannot be underestimated, because advertising generates income for both start-up little-known enterprises and large global organizations. By ordering advertising from video hosting, they can be sure that the popularity of the business will increase significantly, because the audience of the same YouTube is huge in number. Accordingly, there will always be a place for advertising. It also happens that video bloggers order advertising from each other to increase popularity and increase the number of views, which contributes to the development of the video hosting itself and motivates authors to release better material.

Further development of video platforms
What is video hosting now? For some - business or work. For others - a pleasant pastime and the ability to share interesting videos with friends. It is difficult to predict how long the popularity of video hosting sites will remain at a high level, but it is undeniable that their quality should improve both in terms of the video content offered and in terms oftechnological relation. Already now we have a wide range of possibilities. It's hard to imagine what else progress is capable of. Alternatively, with the advent of 5G networks in the future, which will give a significant increase in speed, the amount of data stored on servers will only increase, which, on the one hand, will have a positive effect on the consumer, and on the other hand, will make developers think about storing large amounts of information.