It's hard to believe that YouTube, which serves more than 1 billion videos per day, is a mere five years old today. The domain name YouTube.com was registered on February 14, 2005.
YouTube wasn't the clear leader in 2005: It competed with a range of services from Veoh to Vimeo to Viddler and many more. Some combination of easy uploading, embeddable videos and an early decision to serve up all clips in Flash (plus, some would argue, lenient policies on copyrighted content) eventually saw YouTube emerge as the victor in the video battle. The company sold to Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion.