YouTube's Obadiah Greenberg speaks at Duke about the university's new YouTube channel. Photo credit: Jared Lazarus. Duke Photography.

Durham, NC - Duke University on Wednesday launched its own channel on YouTube, giving the university a new way to reach prospective students and other audiences online. The address of the Duke YouTube channel is www.youtube.com/duke.

The channel highlights material from Duke's classrooms, laboratories and campus life. The initial videos range from students and professors skydiving together to the workings of a prototype cloak of invisibility.

Duke is part of a growing roster of universities featured on YouTube. Duke launched its channel Wednesday following a talk by Obadiah Greenberg, who oversees YouTube's strategic partnerships with universities.

YouTube is the leading online video community that allows people to discover, watch and share originally created videos. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, blogs and e-mail.

"Several hundred thousand people have watched videos from Duke since we began placing them on YouTube in October 2006," said David Jarmul, Duke's associate vice president of news and communications. "This new channel will help us reach even more people and pull together Duke's videos more effectively for students, alumni and others interested in the university or just looking for good material."

Tracy Futhey, Duke's vice president for information technology and chief information officer, noted that Duke's focus on video grew from its experimentation with iPods and iTunes U.

"Our faculty and students are becoming more and more proficient and sophisticated video-content producers, and we want these valuable materials to reach their widest audience possible," she said. "The new Duke YouTube channel provides an important distribution mechanism for Duke-related content."