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Web videos used to be in QuickTime, Windows Media, Real Video, etc. It was a mess to deal with all of those formats, plus the videos would play in an external application.

YouTube popularized Flash-based video, which could play directly in the browser. It's ironic now since the rage is HTML5 and getting away from Flash...

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But right now also there are many other platforms like Vimeo, Blip.tv, Daily Motion, etc. but still nobody is even close to Youtube's popularity.

First mover's advantage. YouTube got lots of videos in the beginning, so it had far more content than anyone else for such a long time. The only way to really usurp that is to have exclusive content, which is what Hulu and YouTube-owned Vevo both have.

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