Ten years ago, three former PayPal employees previewed their new website, YouTube, to the public.

Operating from humble beginnings above a pizza restaurant in San Mateo, California, they would not have predicted in their most optimistic moments that the following year they would sell their new creation to Google for $1.6bn and that it would truly propel web based video into the mainstream. Barely out of nappies, YouTube appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 2006 as its ‘person’ of the year.

Ten years is not a long time in the evolution of linear television, but it is a lifetime in internet video years (which are like dog years, only shorter). In that context, it is a grandee of the modern video-centric web. What began as a sort of free for all version of You’ve Been Framed but with even lower production values and a big focus on skateboarding kittens (alongside more illicit content), YouTube took the broadband internet by storm.

It not only popularised user generated content on a massive scale, it proved that the internet was a viable video distribution platform. YouTube is so prevalent today that it is easy to forget just how different the TV and media landscape looked when it first arrived. In 2005, TV was something you experienced on the, err, television. There were no iPhones, no iPads, no connected TVs, no catchup TV on your PC and no Netflix streaming. Multiscreen viewing was something you did in an electronics retailer while buying one of those fancy new HD flatscreen TVs. TV Anywhere was anywhere a TV was.

By the end of 2007, annual YouTube traffic was reportedly as high as the entire Internet capacity had been just seven years earlier. That year also saw the arrival of Netflix’s streaming service and the BBC’s iPlayer (on Christmas day) and the launch of Apple’s new wonder phone which included the YouTube app on its homescreen (a year before the App Store would even allow you to install other apps) to demonstrate its video credentials.

YouTube’s timing was impeccable and it both drove and rode the explosion in video enabled devices, networks and consumer appetite. By 2010 it was serving two billion videos per day, three billion per day in 2011 and four billion by 2012 and it has just kept growing. Of course, unlike traditional TV, YouTube is not just about viewers; it’s a two-way medium and its users are now uploading 300 hours of video every minute (yes). It is also at the vanguard of mobile video; 50% of all views are now on mobile. Finally, it has an extraordinary reach – one billion people visit the site each month and it is the third most popular website in the world (behind Google and Facebook).

It is also a social phenomenon, providing a global platform for anyone to reach a huge audience. One of its current brightest stars is PewDiePie, a one man band (without a band) who talks to the 36.8 million subscribers to his YouTube channel with little more infrastructure than a decent webcam, PC and microphone. He has clocked up circa nine billion views to date. Peter Capaldi, of Dr Who, fame said “I’m sure if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be doing classic guitar solos on YouTube”. It has expanded the universe of video consumption, both in form and volume. It has changed what television is for some and helped drive how television is experienced for others.

So happy birthday YouTube, you have made quite an impact and I am sure there is a lot more to come.

Steve Plunkett, CTO