Yesterday (May 17, 2010) marked a historic milestone in the age of technology… YouTube turned five! It was 1/20th of a decade ago when the video sharing site launched it’s first video [below]:
PC World was kind enough to provide a timeline of YouTube’s growth and here’s the short version:
April 2005: YouTube is born
October 2006: Google buys YouTube for the bargain price of $1.65 billion dollars.
March 2007: Viacom sues Google over the estimate 100 million videos infringing on copyright laws. A result was the automatic anti-piracy filters found on YouTube today, although the lawsuit is ongoing.
December 2008: YouTube took steps to shed it’s reputation for grainy, low quality videos and introduced high resolution video sharing, with resolutions up to 1080p.
April 2009: In an effort to match Hulu, or at least compete, Google introduced Premium Video Sharing and now is working on establishing relationships with many Hollywood studios. For now, you can watch all seven seasons of MacGyver on YouTube.
May 2009: YouTube is attacked by thousands of porn videos containing common search terms and malware.
June 2009: YouTube becomes one of the foremost sites for getting the word (and video) out about Iranian protests.
October 2009: YouTube is officially serving up 1 billion videos per day.
January 2010: YouTube starts offering paid rentals of many of Sundance Film Festival’s movies and is continually working to offer many Indie films and a few from Lionsgate.
May 2010: YouTube officially serves up over 2 billion videos per day — what a way to celebrate a birthday.
In celebration of YouTube hitting the five year mark, all struggles aside, let’s take a moment to enjoy one of the very best YouTube videos of all time. After all, what would the world be without “Charlie Bit My Finger”?
