(cross-posted from Japanator) What do you get when you combine a video sharing site with the 実況 jikkyou boards (where people post while watching TV shows and such) on 2ch? Nico Nico Douga, a mashup that was started earlier this year, is what you get. Instead of just plain comments, Nico Nico Douga lets users leave comments in real-time which scroll across the movie while it's playing, and -- this is the important part -- also scrolls messages from other users at the point in the movie when they left them, making it almost like you're watching the video together with everybody else that's posted a comment. That feeling made Nico Nico Douga very popular very quickly, and soon all of the bandwidth used apparently earned the ire of YouTube, which cut off Nico Nico Douga's access to movies on their servers last month, marking the end of the public beta test of Nico Nico Douga. However, the development team worked quickly on a new version of the site, and in just one week they established their own video sharing service (with much better video and audio quality than Youtube), SmileVideo, and brought the site in back a limited gamma test open to 100,000 users (about 20% of the average number of users per day during the beta test, according to the developers' blog) on Monday. I quickly got hooked on Nico Nico Douga during the beta test, so of course I signed up as quickly as I could for the gamma test and ended up being number 62227, luckily. Now that Nico Nico Douga is back up, I'll give you a quick rundown of some of the more popular videos on the site after the jump.
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