The document discusses the origins of online video as a new business model, tracing it back to Apple Computer releasing high quality weekly video trailers in the late 1990s. As DSL connections and speeds increased in the early 2000s, more tech startups emerged in Silicon Valley, including Google. YouTube later became popular due to offering larger, higher resolution copyright-free videos and using viral marketing techniques, appealing to consumers rather than just producers. The key was providing a large amount and variety of videos rather than high image quality alone.