Muziic is a media player, FLV encoder and related website, designed to directly access flash video media files from YouTube, without the user having to visit the file's display page on the YouTube website. Muziic can also refer to the organization that created and maintains the project. As the name suggests, the primary focus of Muziic is on accessing YouTube's music resources. Muziic was created by then-fifteen-year-old David Nelson and his father Mark Nelson. David was responsible for the software development, and Mark organized the project as a company. After a year of development, the pair set up a website, www.muziic.com and debuted the Muziic Player software. Since its launch, the Muziic website has experienced rapid growth in traffic, leaving the site has inaccessible at times. The Nelsons are reported as having had to add additional servers, to keep up with demand. The service is able to search, sort, play, and create playlists of YouTube videos. It also has an upload function, allowing users to encode media files as flash video and add them to YouTube. Currently, the Muziic Player is available for Microsoft Windows operating system and is dependent on the Flash Player plug-in for Internet Explorer. The program also has Apple Inc. iPhone and iPod Touch versions. Within twenty-four hours of launch, Muziic for iPhone had become the 29th most popular free music app in the iPhoneApp Store. Muziic is also a version of the iPad. The Muziic website provides a degree of "social networking" functionality for Muziic users as well, including a community generated directory of YouTube videos, playlists, and channels. Muziic also maintains its own YouTube channel and has a presence on Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. The release of Muziic Player version 1 and the related services provided by the Muziic website generated a degree of interest and attention in the online IT community. A number of computer-technology and music-related online news services and bloggers covered the launch and the discussion of various aspects of it. The focus of the coverage has included the Muziic Player and service, the Nelsons, particularly David, because of his youth and central role in creating the software, and the reactions of YouTube, its parent companyGoogle, and the recording industry. The way in which the Muziic Player accesses YouTube videos, bypassing the other content found on the webpages where those videos would normally be displayed, raised questions about the acceptability of Muziic to YouTube/Google, both in terms of the legality and the practical business aspects of the service. It also potentially conflicts with YouTube's relationship with the recording industry and the agreements that YouTube/Google has reached with a number of record companies. YouTube does allow videos hosted on the service to be streamed offsite, subject to certain conditions, and YouTube and Google are developing further aspects of their online video service, including experimentation with the insertion of commercial advertisements into videos and various ways of accessing and organizing content. It was not clear, however, what their reaction would be to third-party developers such as the Nelsons and their Muziic project making use of content hosted on YouTube in such a fashion. The Nelsons state that they had attempted to contact YouTube/Google prior to the launch of the Muziic website but received no response. On March 17, 2009, CNET reported that YouTube and the Nelsons had reached an agreement to allow the Muziic service to continue to operate, and David Nelson was working on minor adjustments to the Muziic Player in order to meet the requirements of the YouTube API terms; the primary change required seems to have involved increasing the size of the player's video screen, which had previously been "postage-stamp sized" due to the emphasis of music in Muziic. Muziic has recently announced over 225,000,000 plays on the service since their launch in February 2009.
