YouTube announces subscription TV service

San Francisco

IT'S hard to imagine from watching the first video posted on YouTube - a 19-second clip from 2005 of one of the company's founders standing in front of an elephant cage at San Diego Zoo - that the service one day could alter the media landscape.

By popularising video watching over the internet, YouTube, which Google bought in 2006, started the ball rolling on so-called cord-cutting, the practice of consumers abandoning cable and satellite television subscriptions for web-based video services.