I WANT MY ITV

When the internet and television merged in the aughts, it was exciting. Then Facebook took over.

- VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

SEPTEMBER 2005, a fun film editor named Robert Ryang took The Shining and cut together a new trailer for it, making the axe-driven horror flick seem like a sweetheart family movie.

YouTube hadn't broken out of beta yet, so Ryang posted his humor gem to a private quarter of his employer's website and gave some friends a dotmov link. One of them posted the link to his blog, and Ryang was an overnight sensation.

The New York Times took notice, observing with awe: "His secret site got 12,000 hits." Ryang also achieved the highest goal of 20th-century humankind: He started getting calls from Hollywood. HELLO, IT'S HOLLYWOOD.

I was a TV critic in those days, and when I first saw Ryang's masterwork- buffering, buffering-I wasn't sure if I was eligible to review it. Was this digital item a show, a movie, an ad, maybe a web page? While I mulled the question, I created a folder called "Internet Television."

Months went by, and YouTube officially launched. Could it be? The nearerotic fantasy of "convergence"-the moment when the internet and television finally fused in a kind of mundane Singularity-had arrived. In June 2006, I wrote on my own blog that people finally seemed "ready to accept video on computers." Four months later, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. The original World Wide Web, a static, low-bandwidth, verbal system of hyperlinks, was over.