Nico Nico Douga (Japanese: ニコニコ動画, which means “Smile Videos”) is a Japanes… Read Full Bio ↴Nico Nico Douga (Japanese: ニコニコ動画, which means “Smile Videos”) is a Japanese video sharing website well-known for its large video remixing community and the real-time display of user comments during the playback. The site was founded by Niwango, a child company of the Japanese media company Dwango. And, Hiroyuki Nishimura, the founder of the Japanese textboard community 2channel, joins Nico Nico Douga as a board member.

Launched on December 12th, 2006, the earliest form of Nico Nico Douga relied on YouTube as its video-hosting service. But as the community continued to grow in traffic and bandwidth usage, YouTube blocked access from Nico Nico Douga beginning on February 23rd, 2007. Consequently, the site was forced to shut down the service but it was relaunched as “Nico Nico Douga Y” with its own video-hosting server less than a month later in March. In May 2007, the Nico Nico Douga for mobile phone users was announced. Since August 9, 2007, “Nico Nico Douga (RC) Mobile” has serviced mobile phones of NTT DoCoMo and au. Its nickname is “Niconico” or “Nico-dō”, where “nikoniko” is the Japanese ideophone for smiling.