A small triangular play button has become one of the most powerful symbols in modern life, representing video's complete conquest of human attention. This comprehensive examination traces video technology's 50-year evolution from VHS's victory over Betamax through Mark Zuckerberg's Facemash becoming Facebook to YouTube's parasocial revolution and Netflix's algorithmic streaming dominance. The article reveals how technologies succeed when they satisfy our dual drives to look at appealing images and experience them with minimal friction—and how psychological mechanisms including curiosity gaps, emotional contagion, and algorithmic amplification weaponize human cognitive biases to drive engagement. Today, video accounts for 82% of all internet traffic, with humans spending eight hours daily on digital media. From controversial origins society prefers not to acknowledge—pornography pioneered online streaming, live feeds, and payment systems years before mainstream platforms—to 15.47 billion views of "Baby Shark Dance," video has transformed from novelty to the dominant form of human communication.