(written from a Production point of view)
Founded on 14 February 2005, YouTube is an American video-sharing website that operates as a subsidiary of Google. The site allows users to upload, view, rate, share, and comment on videos, and includes video clips, TV clips, music videos, movie trailers, and other content such as video blogs, short original videos, and educational videos.
The Star Trek phenomenon too has benefited from the website, as it allows collectors to share clippings which otherwise, aside from the above mentioned examples, would have been relegated to oblivion; these items are mostly of a (semi-)promotional nature, usually recorded in the VHS-era (the quality reflected as such on YouTube), and included items such as The Original Series "blooper reels", The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, ILM Special Visual Effects, Star Trek The Next Generation, The Star Trek Logs: An MTV Big Picture Special Edition, and To Boldly Go.
More recently, YouTube has often become the primary means of dissemination of original, higher quality Star Trek-related material from parties not directly associated with the official franchise, with such releases as Galileo Restoration Project and Julien's Auctions presents: Star Trek. Fan film productions, like James Cawley's Star Trek: New Voyages, have also chosen the website as the primary means of disseminating their releases. Even the Star Trek franchise itself has embraced YouTube as a promotional means for their Kurtzman-era Star Trek productions, by posting truncated behind-the-scenes special feature-type "making-of" featurettes on the service, none of which included on any of the later released official home video formats. [1]
| Digital formats |
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| Amazon Prime • iTunes Store • Dailymotion • Google Play • Movies Anywhere • UltraViolet • Vimeo • VUDU • Xbox SmartGlass • YouTube |