Nico Nico Douga

Nico Nico Douga (ニコニコ動画 Niko Niko Dōga, lit. "Smile Videos") is a popular video sharing website in Japan managed by Niwango, a subsidiary of Dwango. Its nickname is "Niconico" or "Nico-dō", where "nikoniko" is the Japanese ideophone for smiling. Nico Nico Douga is the thirteenth most visited website in Japan. The site won the Japanese Good Design Award in 2007, and an Honorary Mention of the Digital Communities category at Prix Ars Electronica 2008.

Features
Users can upload, view and share video clips. Unlike other video sharing sites, however, comments are overlaid directly onto the video, synced to a specific playback time. This allows comments to respond directly to events occurring in the video, in sync with the viewer—creating a sense of a shared watching experience. Together with Hiroyuki Nishimura serving as director at Niwango, Nico Nico Douga's atmosphere and cultural context is close to 2channel's or Futaba Channel's, and many popular videos have otaku tastes, such as anime, computer games and pop music. Nico Nico Douga offers tagging of videos. Tags may be edited by any user, not just the uploader. Each video may have up to ten tags, of which up to five may be optionally locked by the uploader, but all others may be edited by any user. Frequently these tags are used not only as categorization, but also as critical commentary, satire, or other humor related to the video's content. The site is also known for its MAD Movies and its medleys of popular songs on the website, most notably Kumikyoku Nico Nico Douga. Certain anime are distributed on the website, such as Candy Boy, Tentai Senshi Sunred and Penguin Musume Heart.

Other features include:
 * High video quality: Nico Nico Douga encourages users to pre-encode their videos in a format suitable for unmodified distribution. As of July 5, 2008, H.264 video and AAC audio is supported for both free and premium users.
 * Mylist: Each user may create "mylists", which function similarly to a list of bookmarks. All users can create up to twenty-five mylist folders, while a basic account can have 100 videos recorded and a premium (paid) account 500 videos per mylist, giving them a total of 12,500 mylist spots. Daily mylist activity is used to compute the default ranking view, although one may also sort by view or comment count. Mylists may be optionally made public and linked to; for example, to make a list of one's own works.
 * Uploader comments: The uploader of a video may attach permanent comments to the video. These are often used for such things as subtitles, lyrics, or corrections.
 * Nicoscript: By using special commands in the uploader comments, the uploader can add special effects to the video, including voting, automatic transfer to another video, quiz scoring, and other features.

Niconico.com
In 2010, a version in English was in the works, and in April 2011, an English language beta website, Niconico, was launched. This site allows users to share videos from YouTube, DailyMotion and Nico Nico Douga and view them in Nico Nico Douga's player, which includes the commenting system, as well as add English tags to them. Improvements later made to the site allow users to upload their own videos, with subscribed users able to host livestreams. The site also began streaming select anime titles from June 2011 onwards. On October 14, 2011, Niconico announced a partnership with Funimation Entertainment to form Funico, to handle licensing of anime properties for streaming and home video.