A reconstruction of the 2006 interface of YouTube , including its original video player and first upload, has been acquired by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum as an artifact of early internet culture.
Now on display at the museum’s South Kensington location, the recreated “watch” page lets visitors experience YouTube as it looked during its early Web 2.0 years. The reconstruction was produced with YouTube’s User Experience team using archived front-end code captured by the Internet Archive, along with the original Adobe Flash video player and the platform’s first video titled “Me at the Zoo.” Uploaded on April 24, 2005 by co-founder Jawed Karim, the 19-second clip became the starting point of YouTube’s casual, user-generated style that would later define the online video platform.
The recreated page includes familiar features such as rating buttons, sharing tools, and early advertising formats that shaped how users interacted with video online.
The reconstruction is part of the museum’s “Design 1900 – Now” gallery, alongside other digital artifacts like Flappy Bird and WeChat, reflecting growing efforts to preserve platforms that helped define everyday internet life.
YouTube was founded by Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steven Chen, and was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion.
