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Tudou.com, Hulu, YouTube And Other Online Media Providers

Founded by three PayPal employees in 2005, YouTube quickly grew into the internet's biggest video sharing website. Its social impact has been extraordinary.

YouTube's success stems from its reliance on users and their generated content. Within seconds, a person with access to a computer and limited technical fluency can post a video of him or herself doing whatever... wherever. Indeed, this is the phenomenon of the 21st century. And, like most great technological phenomena of the 21st century, YouTube is owned by Google Inc.

Small-name people and amateurs aren't the only ones posting videos up, these days. Big-shot broadcasters like BBC and CBS offer some material for free via YouTube. And university professors often archive lectures online.

Tech savvy individuals occasionally get their kicks turning to Hulu and Veoh or other, never-heard-of-them companies.

Actually, both Hulu and Veoh are fairly big names now in the video service industry.

Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp, allows users to stream full length movies and episodes legally. Lions Gate Entertainment and Sony Pictures are among Hulu's major providers of media content. Barely over a year old, Hulu is a relative unknown.

Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and Intel all hold shares in Veoh. Each day, millions of viewers watch content by ABC, The WB, ESPN and other media companies through the video service. It attracts 17-28 million unique visitors per month. The statistics dwarf in comparison to YouTube, which boasts itself as the third most visited site on the web. In addition, Veoh does not serve countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

Despite efforts to dethrone or compete with the streaming media giant, YouTube largely remains top dog. It is top provider of online videos in North America.

As China blazes forward in its industrial revolution at a staggering rate, the role it plays in society accordingly increases. Numerous countries, China included, have blocked citizens' access to YouTube. People in China still participate in video sharing daily.

Tudou, headquartered in Shanghai, serves over 7 million users per day. Founded in 2005, the name is a parody on the English idiom "couch potato." Quite quickly, Tudou assumed the position as one of the most popular and used website in the world.

Similar to YouTube, Tudou allows users to upload or watch music videos, news reports, some popular television, etc... And its newly released beta version allows viewing in high definition, which is ultimately akin to selecting YouTube's "&fmt=22" option. The video sharing service relies mostly on amateurs, however is supported by corporation-generated content as well. To date Tudou is one of the world's largest bandwidth users, and transfers about 1 Petabyte of data in a day (1 Petabyte roughly equals 1 million Gigabytes, or a thousand Terabytes). Indeed, the Chinese online media provider features approximately 15 billion minutes of video daily; YouTube users stream one third of the time. This sheer magnitude on which Tudou functions has resulted in wide news coverage in the East, as well as West.

Indeed, options exist for those in places with blocked access to major video services such as YouTube. In fact, those alternative providers might ultimately serve as the competition YouTube has (or hasn't) been waiting for.