Only if you consider hosting the entire infrastructure for concurrent video streaming to millions of users as 'inserting themselves'. Before Youtube there was no way to distribute your home video to a large audience beyond sending the entire physical video file (too large to email, for starters) and the recipients having to deal with whatever mostly proprietary formats it had to be made in.

From the viewers' side, there was no place to go and browse videos, you were limited to short embedded clips or had to download the entire file first.

Youtube was a game changer when it first appeared and Google hadn't yet acquired it.