So much has changed about the way we absorb information in the past few years. Can you even remember what accessing the Internet was like ten years ago? In 1999 one of the most used features in Netscape’s Navigator was the ability to uncheck Autoload Images. Once you did that you would only get text, no pictures. Page load times were crucial as users were often paying per minute to their phone service provider in addition to whatever they were paying their Internet service provider.
Jump forward to 2004 and everyone was starting to sign up for broadband, but no one was watching video online, it was still too heavy. Short clips would be distributed via email inevitably resulting in your inbox getting clogged up trying to download 5 Mb attachments from the server.
Then in early 2006, things started to change – instead of video being attached to emails people started sending links to a mysterious new site called YouTube. Even more exciting was when people started sending links to sites and blogs other than YouTube that had embedded videos that were hosted by YouTube.
By the time YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in September 2006, everyone who used the Internet regularly had seen one of their videos. Once it became common practice for people to watch video online, it was only a short time before it became an essential part of the experience. As the commercial world started to exploit the power of the Internet for business, it became clear that online video would be co-opted into that fight and made available by almost every business with an online presence which, by 2009, meant every business!