VBox7 (pronounced "vi box sedem" in Bulgarian and "vi box seven" in English, stylized variously as VBOX7 or vbox7) is a Bulgarian video platform. As of April 2017, it was the 22nd most popular website in

Bulgaria Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey t ...

. The website has been owned by the Netinfo company since October 2007.

History

The site was launched on 30 July 2006 and in the beginning it regularly had only a few visitors. The site's slogan was ''The Bulgarian video sharing website''. In March 2008, VBox7 was regularly visited by around 200,000 people while there were more than 9,000 registered users. On 6 February 2012 the mobile version of the site was launched. Two years later, a mobile app for Android and

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

was created. In early June 2014, the site launched a partnership program because

user-generated content User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), emerged from the rise of web services which allow a system's User (computing), users to create Content (media), content, such as images, videos, audio, text, testi ...

was not seen as profitable anymore. VBox7 started to transition to self-produced content and partners network. In 2015, famous Bulgarian vloggers (Emil Conrad and Boryana Stefanova, for example) migrated to

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

. Videos of users, who didn't have a contract with VBox7, were made inaccessible from outside Bulgaria. A lot of previously uploaded videos were deleted. VBox7 changed its

design A design is the concept or proposal for an object, process, or system. The word ''design'' refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, and is sometimes used to refer to the inherent nature of something ...

to a more mobile-friendly one, merging the mobile and desktop versions. The transition was considered complete by the end of 2016.

Features

Video technology

Previously, watching videos on VBox7 required the

Adobe Flash Player Adobe Flash Player (known in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome as Shockwave Flash) is a discontinuedExcept in China, where it continues to be used, as well as Harman for enterprise users. computer program for viewing multimedia ...

plug-in to be installed because the site made use of the flv video format. Now, VBox7 uses an

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

video player and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is its default video compression format. The site also supports HD videos up to

2160p 4K resolution refers to a horizontal display resolution of approximately 4,000 pixels. Digital television and digital cinematography commonly use several different 4K resolutions. In television and consumer media, 38402160 (4K UHD) with a 16:9 asp ...

Mobile app

VBox7 published its mobile app in March 2014. As of April 2016 it had around 1 million downloads in

Google Play Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store, Play Store, or sometimes the Android Store (and was formerly Android Market), is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certifie ...

and

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

References

External links