Online Video - History of Online Video

Online Videos – Where Did They Come From?

Seeing and sometimes watching online video is nowadays an accepted and integral part of any web surfers normal browsing experiences, taken for granted almost.  Nobody bats an eyelash at seeing a video on a website or news page. Videos on the net are becoming as normal and as widely accepted as normal ‘text and image’ web pages.
And its birth can be pretty much traced back to one small group of people, and almost to one specific day!

On St. Valentines Day (February 14) 2005, three guys called Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, all ex-employees of PayPal, decided that the internet was ready for a new form of massacre.  They formed YouTube, Inc, and the very next day, the 15th, “youtube.com” was activated, with the website itself being launched very soon afterwards.

These three guys had a vision that the Internet was the perfect medium to allow anyone and everyone to put their own videos online. It was not important that the vast majority of these videos were poor quality, home made and distinctly amateur.

As has since been proved beyond all doubt by reality TV shows and the constant re-runs of ‘funniest kids’ or ‘funny animals’ home video based programs, people are fascinated by watching other people.  It was a stunningly simple and (now) obvious concept. Yet these three guys were the first ones to see it as such and bring it to life.

It was also a massively, massively successful concept.

So successful, in fact, that youtube.com went from zero to over 4 million monthly visitors within 3 months of its initial launch.  Indeed, so successful was it that youtube.com just kept on growing, eventually becoming so popular that Google bought out the company in October 2006 for US$1.65billion.

Check out the dates once again. This buy-out took place only 20 months after YouTube was founded, and before they had ever made one single cent in profit!  There’s no doubt that at the time, this buy-out left an awful lot of analysts and
so-called experts scratching their heads in amazement. 

Article by i-MediaSystemz.com