By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
Published: September 11, 2010

This is the era of the screen — touch, wide, flat, etc. — and tennis is not even close to immune.

The players’ lounge at the United States Open was brimming with technology last week. Among the screens in use at 3 p.m. Tuesday were 6 iPhones, 5 BlackBerrys, 24 laptop computers and 2 iPads. Most were being used for Facebook, e-mail and Skype, others for watching movies and some for watching tennis video.

In a world of proliferating information, more tennis footage is available by the day on a Web site like YouTube. Players, particularly younger players, are taking advantage to scout opponents, study new technique and, of course, have a chuckle.

“I do get a kick out of it,” the American Alexa Glatch said. “I’ll just go on YouTube browsing and stuff, tennis bloopers or whatever.”

Glatch and her coach, Ryan Segelke, also use YouTube for business, analyzing the style of her future opponents, which is something Andy Roddick and others will sometimes do when they draw an obscure, low-ranked player in a tournament.

“You can find full matches sometimes, but sometimes even clips and a few points here and there can tell a lot,” Glatch said.

Instructional videos have been part of the game for decades, and coaches (and parents) have long videotaped players to help them grasp and address their own technical weaknesses. But the abundance of free video clips has democratized the access to excellence.

Yulia Putintseva, an intense and promising Russian junior who is in the final of the girls’ competition at the Open, has a slashing forehand that, despite being hit with her right hand, bears a strong resemblance to a forehand hit by a certain indefatigable Spanish champion.

That is no coincidence.

“I’m always going on YouTube and putting the Rafael Nadal shots on slow motion,” Putintseva, 15, said. “That’s exactly what I’m copying.”

Ben Wagland, a 17-year-old from Sydney, Australia, who played in the boys’ tournament, also studies Nadal. (Wagland is left-handed.)

“Everyone looks at their favorite players on YouTube and tries to copy their technique to get a better sense of how the game is changing and make yourself a better player,” Wagland said. “I like the way Rafa plays. His swing is fast, and I try to copy that.”

It is not only among players that Nadal footage is in demand. Agents, whose livelihoods depend on finding the next big thing, also make use of it. Lawrence Frankopan, the president of Lagardère Unlimited in Britain, uses Nadal as a measuring stick.

“You see an 11-year-old kid, and it’s only natural to say, ‘Let’s put Rafa Nadal in at 11 to see what he was doing at this age, and how he was playing,’ ” Frankopan said. “So you go online and type in Rafa Nadal, 11 years old, and boom! So then I look at my 11-year-old and go, ‘Hmmmm.’ ”

An early video of Nadal dates to July 12, 1998, when he was 12 and playing in a tournament in Barcelona, Spain, not yet picking at his shorts before serves and already running around his backhand and giving polite television interviews. It has been viewed more than 700,000 times.

“There’s not huge amounts of early stuff out there, but there’s enough to get an idea,” Frankopan said.

Search a bit more and you can find footage of Novak Djokovic, ball cap askew, grunting as he whacks serves and overheads at age 7 on a court in Serbia.

One suspects that the rising generation of players will be even better documented, and there are videos of, for example, some of Putintseva’s junior matches on YouTube.

Frankopan said parents and others sometimes e-mailed links to video of a young prospect.

“But normally what happens in our industry is we have this network of coaches and so on that tells you that you should look out for this guy or this guy,” he said. “And the first thing I would do is Google and find the results and see if there is any YouTube footage.”

Glatch, a 21-year-old Californian ranked No. 369 after being as high as No. 102 last year, sometimes uses YouTube to watch herself play, and she is hardly alone. During the Open, Michael Llodra, a flashy French player with a large personality, was asked if he had seen Roger Federer’s no-look between-the-legs winner against Brian Dabul.

“Amazing,” Llodra said. “But for what it’s worth, I did one like that, too, against Tommy Haas at Indian Wells, and I invite you to watch it on the Web.”

Indeed it is there. The year was 2007, and Llodra scrambled just about as deep in the court and passed Haas at the net with a tweener. Federer’s shot was more unusual because he passed Dabul when Dabul was still on the baseline.

More tennis exotica is available for viewing, including Jeff Tarango’s Wimbledon walk-off in 1995; a mind-bending 45-stroke, 62-second rally between Federer and Lleyton Hewitt at Indian Wells, Calif.; a leaping overhead winner that Federer hit off an Andy Roddick overhead in Basel, Switzerland, Federer’s hometown; a serve that Roddick embedded in a clay court (staged for a commercial).

The tennis fan is well served by this.

If you want to know how agile Bjorn Borg really was in 1973 at age 17, a click or two brings him in view. The same goes for Rod Laver playing Ken Rosewall in Sydney in 1970. Or Maureen Connolly and Doris Hart in the 1953 Wimbledon final.

But players also use this archive to examine tennis history, sometimes recent history.

“Somebody told me Federer cried at the Australian Open last year, and I didn’t believe it, so I went on YouTube and looked,” said Sloane Stephens, an American who lost in the Open girls semifinals. “I still don’t believe it. Did you know that he cried?”

(Source: A version of this article appeared in print on September 12, 2010, on page SP9 of the New York edition.)