The video is short — just 19 seconds — and not particularly compelling. A viewer would be forgiven for clicking away before it ends.
The grainy footage, uploaded on April 23, 2005, of a man standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo — “All right, so here we are in front of the elephants” — does not look like the sort of thing that would touch off a video revolution.
And yet, two decades after that inauspicious start, YouTube is now a cornerstone of the media ecosystem. It’s where people go for music videos and four-hour-long…
