YouTube exceeds 4 billion video views on global basis per day

PanARMENIAN.Net - YouTube said Monday, Jan 23, that it has exceeded 4 billion video views on a global basis per day, a sharp bump up from what the company said at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, PC Magazine reported.

Robert Kyncl, vice president of content at Google and a former architect of the Netflix streaming business, said that YouTube serves 3 billion hours per video every month. It counts 800 million unique monthly visitors, dwarfing CBS, Hulu, and Netflix, he said at the time.

YouTube also said that users are now uploading an hour of video every second, as users watch - and upload - more and more video.

In total, YouTube said that users are uploading 60 hours of video every minute, a feat that YouTube commemorated with onehourpersecond.com, a site devoted to cartoony representations of what an hour per second of video looks like.

For example, in 4 minutes 11 seconds of uploads to YouTube, the average person blinks 157,500 times, the site notes. Or in 3 minutes 45 seconds, a gaggle of retirees can take a cruise from Los Angeles to Tokyo.

YouTube's push now is to enable its Channels, dedicated bundles of videos all designed by YouTube's content partners, a focus of YouTube's December redesign. Although YouTube seems interested in signing up premium talent, the site has had the most luck taking smaller content creators and giving them the worldwide audience even networks can't deliver. Many of the top channels within YouTube rank, in terms of viewership, with the top cable channels, Kyncl said at CES. According to one report, however, social giant Facebook has expressed an interest in luring one of Google's top channels, Vevo, over to Facebook.

Last week, YouTube launched an online film festival that will culminate with 10 finalists being sent to the 2012 Venice Film Festival for a chance to win half a million dollars.