Science.tv is a

virtual community A virtual community is a social network of individuals who connect through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Some of the most pervasive virtual communi ...

for people interested in

science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

. It enables users to upload videos and categorize them according to subject matter and intended audience.

History

science.tv was founded by Matt Thurling, a

digital media Digital media is any communication media that operate in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital media can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronics device. ' ...

pioneer and film-maker based in

Bristol Bristol () is a city, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city in ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

.Partial Immortalization, December 29, 2007
/ref> Research and development work began in 2005 and the site was launched in December 2007. Thurling writes th

where he sets out the vision for the site and invites feedback and suggestions for improvements.

Domain name

The .tv ("dot-tv") extension is a

Top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...

name, originally associated with the Polynesian island nation of

Tuvalu Tuvalu ( or ; formerly known as the Ellice Islands) is an island country and microstate in the Polynesian subregion of Oceania in the Pacific Ocean. Its islands are situated about midway between Hawaii and Australia. They lie east-northeast ...

. The entire domain was purchased from the islands' residents in 2000 and the suffix is now increasingly being used for sites featuring, or relating to, video content.

Technology

A look at the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

of science.tv reveals a front-end built with

Cascading Style Sheets Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

. Video is delivered using the

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...

codec A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or da ...

. The back-end relies on a

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

interface to a

mySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

content management system A content management system (CMS) is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content (content management).''Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy''. Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, Steve Manning. New ...

Content

The focus of science.tv is

user-generated content User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...

, and much of the content on the site is actually embedded from other video sites, including

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

. The intended audience is broad, ranging from school students to academics and professional programme-makers.Partial Immortalization, December 31, 2007
/ref> Users are able to navigate for content via site-wide search, tags and by preset categories, which include: physics, chemistry and biology.

References

{{Reflist Science websites Defunct websites