YouTube celebrates five years online

gallery

It may seem hard to believe there once existed an internet without videos of kittens playing the piano, but it was just five years ago today that YouTube's domain was formally registered.

While the site has yet to pull a profit, it has serves millions of videos each day - some days topping a billion - with 20 hours worth uploaded each minute.

"When we registered the YouTube domain on 14 February, 2005, we set out to create a place where anyone with a video camera and an internet connection could share a story with the world," said Chad Hurley, co-founder of the site, in a blog post.

He said the site has succeeded in giving people a voice, saying "video has the power to give rise to the most diverse set of faces and voices ever seen or heard in human history."

Speaking to content copyright battles the site has faced over the years, Hurley stressed: "We succeed when our partners succeed... content creation isn't our business; it's theirs. But breaking open access to media and distribution means delivering the world's largest global audience and the revenue models they need to succeed, as well as the tools they need to control their content."

Hurley also put an eye to the future, saying online video delivery needs constant innovation, suggesting 3D or automatic speech recognition was on his mind.

Read on to find out if online video can ever be profitable.

Email to a friend

Print this page