This site uses cookies to improve your experience and to provide services and advertising.
By continuing to browse, you agree to the use of cookies described in our Cookies Policy.
You may change your settings at any time but this may impact on the functionality of the site.
To learn more see our Cookies Policy.
IT’S DIFFICULT NOWADAYS to think of an era of online video streaming before YouTube – when a simple site decided to give users the chance to upload videos and allow them to be watched on the web by pretty much anyone.
YouTube’s major single asset was the fact that videos could be viewed through a web page itself, without needing to embed a video or require the user to fire up another heavy-going media player like RealPlayer, QuickTime or Windows Media Player.
Advertisement
Such was the speed with which the site took off that only 18 months after its first video was uploaded, the site was taken over by Google in a deal that netted its creators $1.65 billion worth of Google shares – which are worth over $2bn at current prices.
The first video was loaded in the late hours of Saturday 23 April, 2005 (which, technically, was April 24 in Ireland’s time zone), and shows one of the site’s three founders, Jawed Karim, visiting the elephant pen at the San Diego Zoo.
What have we learned? Well, that streaming videos is a lucrative business – but also, apparently, that elephant’s trunks are “really, really long”.
Thursday 28 November, 2024
Thursday 28 November, 2024
Download our app
YouTube turns six - but have you seen its first ever video?
IT’S DIFFICULT NOWADAYS to think of an era of online video streaming before YouTube – when a simple site decided to give users the chance to upload videos and allow them to be watched on the web by pretty much anyone.
YouTube’s major single asset was the fact that videos could be viewed through a web page itself, without needing to embed a video or require the user to fire up another heavy-going media player like RealPlayer, QuickTime or Windows Media Player.
Such was the speed with which the site took off that only 18 months after its first video was uploaded, the site was taken over by Google in a deal that netted its creators $1.65 billion worth of Google shares – which are worth over $2bn at current prices.
The first video was loaded in the late hours of Saturday 23 April, 2005 (which, technically, was April 24 in Ireland’s time zone), and shows one of the site’s three founders, Jawed Karim, visiting the elephant pen at the San Diego Zoo.
What have we learned? Well, that streaming videos is a lucrative business – but also, apparently, that elephant’s trunks are “really, really long”.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Birthdays Google In The Stream Jawed Karim San Diego YouTube