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 created in 2006 and 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.

After a sitewide revamp of the website with new features added, the website was officially renamed to "niconico".

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 50 videos uploaded while a premium (paid) account can create 50 mylist folders with 25,000 total mylist spots and an unlimited amount of uploaded videos. 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 April 2011, an English language beta website, Niconico, was launched. This site allowed 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. The full English Nico Nico version was launched on October 17, 2012 which can be accessed with the same URL as the japanese version (nicovideo.jp), therefore the english niconico.com feature was disabled. The language settings can be changed at the bottom of the page (nearby the 言語).

Nico Q
Along with the full English version of Nico Nico Douga, the site got a new design, with the "Nico Q" version of Nico Nico Douga being launched. The old version of Nico Nico Douga is still usable and the preferences can be changed here for the japanese version.

The Nico Q version came with a new "faster, lighter video player", a linking history, a revamp of the Nico Live (Namahousou) Top page, an realtime notification system and a new broadcating system. For more information on the new features, visit this link.

Along with the english full version, Nico Nico Douga also released a cheatsheet of frequently used words on Nico Nico Douga.