The Peabody Awards recognized YouTube in 2008, a little over three years after Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim launched it on Feb. 14, 2005. I remember this because I was on the board that debated whether it was too early to award a website that, as former NBC anchor Brian Williams put it at that year’s Peabody ceremony, “changed the very meaning of electronic communication.”
At that time, YouTube’s boast that 15 hours of video were uploaded to the site every minute was staggering, along with the hundreds of millions of views it drew from around the world. But its long-term impact on so-called legacy media, TV and movies was still unknowable.
