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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

YouTube turns 15 today. Watch the first video it posted [cnet.com]:

The clip is just 18 seconds long, but 15 years ago, it kicked off an online video revolution. Thursday marks the 15th anniversary of the first-ever YouTube video, which shows company co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.

[Video is at https://www.youtube.com/embed/jNQXAC9IVRw [youtube.com]]

[...] "All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants, and the cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks," Karim says. "And that's, that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say."

[...] Karim founded YouTube along with Steven Chen and Chad Hurley, all of whom were former PayPal employees. He's said in the past [forbes.com] that part of the inspiration for the site came when he missed Janet Jackson's famous wardrobe malfunction at the 2004 Super Bowl[*], and couldn't find online video of the goof. Just one year after the 2005 zoo video was made, Karim and his fellow YouTube co-founders sold the platform to Google for $1.65 billion [cnn.com].

Obligatory link to YouTube video of the 2004 Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction [youtube.com].

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