YouTube Viewers Consume A Collective 1 Billion Hours Of Video Every Day
It has been just over 12 years since three former PayPal employees got together and created YouTube, which they sold to Google less than two years later for $1.65 billion. In the time since then, YouTube has grown into an online broadcasting juggernaut. To put the service's popularity into perspective, YouTube announced its newest milestone—hitting 1 billion hours of watched video per day.
That is a collective figure among all the eyeballs tuning into YouTube, whether it's to watch a funny collection of cat videos or to see New England Patriots quarterback Tom "The GOAT" Brady brush his teeth (among other activities showcasing Intel's 360 Replay technology). Whatever the case might be, a lot of people head to YouTube on a daily basis to watch just about anything.
Reaching a billion hours on a daily basis is quite the feat. For an individual to watch that many hours of content, it would take him or her over 100,000 years, and that is without any restroom breaks or downtime for sleeping.
"100,000 years ago, our ancestors were crafting stone tools and migrating out of Africa while mammoths and mastodons roamed the Earth. If you spent 100,000 years traveling at the speed of light, you could travel from one end of the Milky Way to the other (and you wouldn’t age a day!). And if you searched for 100,000 years on YouTube, you’d find a really killer KISS track," YouTube stated in a blog post.
It's a pretty remarkable milestone when you think about it in that kind of context. Of course, not all of the content on YouTube is worthwhile—consider that PewDiePie is the service's top broadcaster—but that is beside the point. Good, bad, or in between, YouTube is serving up a massive amount of video each day. If nothing else, that is something to appreciate just from the technical side—more often than not, YouTube works the way it should despite the large amount of content being uploaded, processes, and streamed on a daily basis.
YouTube has also done a good job of keeping up with the times. For instance, it rolled out 4K live streaming with standard and 360-degree viewing at up to 60 frames per second last year, and more recent it introduced a Super Chat feature that allows fans to fork over funds to make their comments stand out from the crown.
We'll have to wait and see what YouTube has in store for the rest of 2017.
That is a collective figure among all the eyeballs tuning into YouTube, whether it's to watch a funny collection of cat videos or to see New England Patriots quarterback Tom "The GOAT" Brady brush his teeth (among other activities showcasing Intel's 360 Replay technology). Whatever the case might be, a lot of people head to YouTube on a daily basis to watch just about anything.
Reaching a billion hours on a daily basis is quite the feat. For an individual to watch that many hours of content, it would take him or her over 100,000 years, and that is without any restroom breaks or downtime for sleeping.
"100,000 years ago, our ancestors were crafting stone tools and migrating out of Africa while mammoths and mastodons roamed the Earth. If you spent 100,000 years traveling at the speed of light, you could travel from one end of the Milky Way to the other (and you wouldn’t age a day!). And if you searched for 100,000 years on YouTube, you’d find a really killer KISS track," YouTube stated in a blog post.
It's a pretty remarkable milestone when you think about it in that kind of context. Of course, not all of the content on YouTube is worthwhile—consider that PewDiePie is the service's top broadcaster—but that is beside the point. Good, bad, or in between, YouTube is serving up a massive amount of video each day. If nothing else, that is something to appreciate just from the technical side—more often than not, YouTube works the way it should despite the large amount of content being uploaded, processes, and streamed on a daily basis.
YouTube has also done a good job of keeping up with the times. For instance, it rolled out 4K live streaming with standard and 360-degree viewing at up to 60 frames per second last year, and more recent it introduced a Super Chat feature that allows fans to fork over funds to make their comments stand out from the crown.
We'll have to wait and see what YouTube has in store for the rest of 2017.
