Friday, October 09, 2009

A Billion Videos A Day

It seems a lifetime since we talked about the superhighway being a ‘dirt track’ and questioned whether the bandwidth would ever happen. We now have broadband widely available and content exploding to use it. We once thought that a full length video streaming service would demand too much bandwidth to work but we now have services such as Hulu. BBC iPlayer and even international football matches over the net.

Some 3 years ago Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. Today they celebrate stating that they now get well over a billion views a day on the service. Writing on the company blog, Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-founder of YouTube said that " This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you". He went on, “As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we've started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we've brought more shows and movies to the site. There are now more ways than ever to make and consume content, and more of you are looking to turn your hobby into a real business.”

This week The Telegraph also disclosed that YouTube are about to sign up to its first UK full length content deal with Channel 4 and plan to sell advertising around the content.

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