YouTube Launches

FEB 14 2005 · 12:00

Chris Crocker's Leave Britney Alone, uploaded to YouTube in September 2007, one of the platform's first viral video-to-GIF cuts. The template the next decade of reaction-GIF excavation would follow. Place: San Mateo, California · above a pizzeria Figures: Steve Chen · Chad Hurley · Jawed Karim, three former PayPal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim register youtube.com on 14 February 2005 and ship a beta within months. The technical proposition: upload any video, the site re-encodes to Flash Video (FLV) and serves it inline in a 425x350 player that the Adobe Flash plugin (already on >95% of consumer browsers by 2005) can render without a separate launch. Karim's first upload, Me at the zoo, goes up on 23 April 2005. The medium that will eventually displace the GIF as the primary reaction format of the consumer web (see [[tiktok-takes-over-2021]]) starts here. But the displacement is not immediate. For the next decade YouTube and the GIF complement each other: YouTube is the source pool, the GIF is the cut-and-loop excerpt format. The two co-exist as a pipeline.