YouTube & streaming

The clickable text boxes, arrows and speech bubbles laid over a YouTube video — annotations — introduced in 2008, used for 'click here for part 2', choose-your-own-adventure videos and corrections shouted over the original mistake, and removed in January 2019 after mobile made them invisible. The record notes the interactive videos they enabled — 'you choose the ending' — are now unplayable, which is an ending.

Two English brothers and a bitten finger, viewed nearly nine hundred million times. Deleted from YouTube in 2021 after being sold as an NFT, making it the first meme to be bought out of public life.

A baritone leaving the microphone to breathe. Died when Dr Pepper hired him to sing about a soft drink, which was the point at which sincerity became inventory.

YouTube's automated fingerprint system, launched in 2007, which matches uploads against a database of copyrighted audio and video and lets the rights holder claim the revenue, block the video or mute it — as the machine that decides whether your ten seconds of a song is fair use, and always decides no. The record notes it has claimed birdsong, white noise and a creator's own composition.

A protester shouting the sentence at police as he was tased. Yale's most memorable quote of 2007, which was the moment it became a quotation rather than a thing that happened to someone.

A cat in a blue shirt playing someone off after a failure. The pistachio adverts arrived in 2010 and the joke did not survive being licensed.

A tearful defence filmed under a bedsheet, watched two million times in one day. The first time the internet made someone famous specifically to mock them, then felt bad about it a decade later.

'Sub4sub' — subscribe to me and I'll subscribe to you — as the late-2000s comment-section barter by which small channels swapped subscribers who would never watch either channel again. The record notes the practice was banned by YouTube in stages and survives as a phrase meaning any hollow reciprocity, and that the subscribers are still there, not watching.

The watermark 'Unregistered HyperCam 2' in the top-left corner of a screen recording — as the badge of the mid-2000s YouTube tutorial made by a child with a free trial, a Notepad window for narration, and a song from Linkin Park. The record notes the phrase is now a nostalgia trigger for an era of video in which nobody had a microphone and everybody had a Runescape account.

A video posted as a reply to another video and linked beneath it — a video response — as the 2006–2013 YouTube feature by which vloggers argued with each other in the format of the argument, and by which a rebuttal could get more views than the original. The record notes it was removed in September 2013 for a reported click-through of 0.0004%, which is a number the record has not forgotten.

A video in which someone applies makeup to a face, on camera, so that viewers can copy the steps. The first on YouTube is credited to Adrienne K. Nelson in 2006: light jazz, a model, no voiceover, no introduction. The genre became beauty YouTube, which became an industry. The record's entry for the format before the sponsorship.

A rap about cupcakes and Narnia that made YouTube a household name over a single Christmas. NBC had it taken down in February 2006, having noticed the audience but not the lesson.

The first video uploaded to YouTube — 19 seconds of co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo, noting that elephants have 'really, really, really long trunks' — as the platform's founding document, and, since 2013, the place where its author posts complaints about the platform in the description. The record notes the video has more views than most films and the elephants have not been credited.

'hi every1 im new!!!!!!! *holds up spork*' — the opening of a mid-2000s copypasta written in the voice of a hyperactive forum newcomer who is 'random' and 'lol so quirky', signed 't3h PeNgU1N oF d00m'. The record notes it was a parody when it was written, that it is now the only surviving specimen of the style it parodied, and that the spork is still held up.

Every song on every hard drive in the world, indexed. Alive for twenty-five months and sued to death by a drummer; the name survives on a streaming service nobody chose.

A comment announcing that it was the first comment. A race to be seen having nothing to say, and it was won every single time.

Pirated software, with a z. The scene, the couriers, the NFO files, the ASCII art; a whole civilisation that streaming made pointless.