[irobeth]

Back in the day you if you wanted to 'watch internet videos' then you needed a video player, you needed codecs, you needed to download the videos, you needed to find the videos

If you wanted to share videos online, good luck? You needed somewhere you could upload them and a lot of forums had file size limits, so sometimes you just spread/discovered them via p2p services. For the non-technical person, there were a few places you could submit videos to or browse 'funny internet videos', but most video sites were an individual or community's curated collection

Youtube bundled all of that up as "a video repository and search engine that provides a streaming player which is already supported by your browser", and (in the US anyway) that moment coincided with: (a) wide-spread broadband access and (b) digital cameras becoming accessible to consumers

So in that context, I think it might be a bit like saying "interest in reading increased after book printing technology made libraries comparatively inexpensive"