{"id":299589,"date":"2026-02-24T10:24:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T10:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/299589\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T10:24:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T10:24:11","slug":"the-very-first-youtube-video-is-officially-a-work-of-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/299589\/","title":{"rendered":"The very first YouTube video is officially a work of art"},"content":{"rendered":"

YouTube<\/a> may be the most watched video platform in the world, and perhaps the biggest existential threat to traditional TV in history, but it wasn’t always the cultural behemoth it is today. Back in April 2005, the whole thing was much more quaint; in fact, there was only one video \u2013 a grainy 19-second piece-to-camera featuring a young man at the zoo.<\/p>\n

Over the last two decades, ‘Me at the zoo’ has racked up over 380M views. And now, the unassuming video uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim is a literal artwork, having just been snapped up as a digital exhibit by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.<\/p>\n

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\"YouTube\"\n<\/p>\n

The reconstructed web page (Image credit: V&A)<\/p>\n

“The acquisition of the earliest available YouTube watch page featuring \u2018Me at the zoo\u2019, dated 8 December 2006, captures a significant moment in the history of the internet and web design \u2013 the shift from a read-only internet to one centred on user-generated multimedia content, social interaction and collaboration, otherwise known as Web 2.0,” reads a blog post on the V&A website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

The museum explains how the acquisition is actually three-fold, and goes beyond just the video itself. It includes the original front-end code as captured by the Internet Archive on 8 December 2006 (including the original Adobe<\/a> Flash video player), the video file for ‘Me at the zoo’, and YouTube ads from 2006 and 2007. These were used to ‘reconstruct’ the page as it appeared at the time.<\/p>\n

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\"YouTube\"\n<\/p>\n

YouTube banner ads from 2006 and 2007 (Image credit: V&A)<\/p>\n

“Reconstructing the early watch page was a joint effort between V&A curators and conservators, YouTube\u2019s User Experience team and interaction design studio oio<\/a>,” the museum explains. “The main challenge of the reconstruction process was working through the technological obsolesce of the underlying technologies that sustained YouTube at the time. This included YouTube\u2019s custom video player, designed by Ches Wajda, that was built to run on Adobe Flash Player. To bring its functionality back, despite Adobe Flash Player no longer being supported by modern browsers, the team used the Flash emulator Ruffle.”<\/p>\n

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\"YouTube\"\n<\/p>\n

The web page on display at the V&A (Image credit: V&A)<\/p>\n

Perhaps the strangest thing here isn’t the fact that the V&A has acquired a video and a web page, but the fact rather that YouTube itself is over 20 years old. I can’t quite believe it either \u2013 but with Gen Z loving Y2K tech <\/a>and the iPod making a comeback<\/a>, it seems what’s old is new again.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sign up to Creative Bloq’s daily newsletter, which brings you the latest news and inspiration from the worlds of art, design and technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"YouTube may be the most watched video platform in the world, and perhaps the biggest existential threat to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":299590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-299589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}