We Now Watch One Billion Hours Of YouTube Daily
YouTube is a perfectly programmed bad habit for many - starting with just one video and spiralling into hours of random content that you can’t help but continue watching. Well, the video service just reached a new milestone as people around the world are watching a billion hours of video every day.
The service has over a billion users (almost a third of all people on the internet), who have all been trained by the doctrine of auto-playing video to watch over 100,000 years of content per day… Or roughly an hour of video per person, but whichever way you look at it that’s huge!
“100,000 years ago, our ancestors were crafting stone tools and migrating out of Africa while mammoths and mastodons roamed the Earth.” Chris Goodrow, VP of engineering at YouTube wrote in a blog post. “If you spent 100,000 years travelling 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!).”
This achievement represents the “diverse videos that creative people make every single day,” according to Goodrow. Peaking curiosity, finding new music, keeping up to date with news, catching up on latest trends, or just humbly chuckling at the latest doggo compilation.
However you look at this, it goes to show just how the traditional TV industry is slowly fading away into redundancy. Hell, YouTube are even starting to enter the TV game - showing some admittance of defeat in the face of this massive base of creative content.
Now begs the question, what’s next?
Alongside the scientists, 50% of the British public and the future health of young people across the nation, I have one simple request: delay Freedom Day, please.