YouTube management made a difficult and contentious decision a few years back to turn its primary focus away from the number of views videos garnered to focusing on daily YouTube hours viewed. YouTube reached a major milestone along that course last year as viewers watched 1 billion hours of YouTube OTT video content per day.
Any one person would need to spend more than 100,000 years watching YouTube video content to reach the 1 billion-hour mark, VP of engineering Cristos Goodrow touted in a blog post.
He also highlighted, and applauded, YouTube users for the great diversity of video content they have been uploading to Google’s flagship OTT video platform. “That’s the great thing about this milestone. It represents the enjoyment of the fantastically diverse videos that creative people make every single day.”
“Around the world, people are spending a billion hours every day rewarding their curiosity, discovering great music, keeping up with the news, connecting with their favorite personalities, or catching up with the latest trend.”
Daily YouTube Hours Viewed
YouTube’s success in reaching the 1 billion hour a day mark wasn’t easy, he continued. “We’ve worked hard behind the scenes to make that billion-hour journey possible, but this isn’t just our milestone,” he wrote.
“It belongs to all of you, too—the global audience that tunes in every day and the creators whose videos have made YouTube the original, surprising and limitless source of entertainment it is. From all of us here at YouTube, please accept our heartfelt thanks.”
Google and YouTube execs have also been busy striking up partnerships with incumbent pay-TV rivals. Comcast and Google announced they will launch a Comcast YouTube app on Xfinity X1 across the country later this year.
Using the X1-YouTube app, Xfinity X1 subscribers will be able to access, browse and stream YouTube’s complete catalog (which now includes billions of videos) via the Internet alongside Xfinity X1’s live, on-demand, DVR and Web programming content offerings.