48 Hours of Video Added Every Minute to YouTube
According to this item over at Gizmodo (here) people across the world posted up a ‘new’ 48 hours of video to YouTube for every minute so far in 2011.
Just to make this perfectly clear: For every minute of every day that ticks by an additional 48 hours of video viewing is being uploaded to the YouTube servers.
If you are not already finding this bit of data amazing then consider …..
- There are 1,440 minutes in a day so that means 68,120 hours of video are uploaded each day.
- Which is 483,840 hours per week.
- 2,080,512 hours of video uploaded per month.
- So for a whole year that works out to pretty close to 25 million hours of uploaded video.
Twenty five million hours!
Now, as everyone knows, there are 8,760 hours in a ‘perfect’ year (or 8,765.81277 hours in a real year).
So, that means then, that for 2011—assuming the upload rates don’t drop off during 2011, which is a pretty safe assumption—the equivalent of 2,854 years of video watching will be uploaded to YouTube.
Stated another way, if you were to watch YouTube videos 24 hours a day every day of the year you would only be able to watch 0.035 percent or 1/2,854th of what has been uploaded in the one year.
Finally, based on the rule-of-thumb that 1 minute of your average 480y level 6 compressed video requires 2.2MB of storage* then one year’s worth of video uploaded to YouTube consumes about 3,300,000,000 megabytes of disk storage. That is (more or less) 3,300,000 gigabytes or 3,300 terabytes. And because all this is most likely backed up at at least once to on-line storage (disk) then the real storage needed is going to be doubled making it 6,600 terabytes or 6.6 petabytes—for one year of video storage.
[* Many of the videos on YouTube are larger than 480y with 720y videos becoming more common and 1080y (High-Def) probably comprising about 5 percent of videos. A level 8 compression 720y 5 megapixel capture video—typical of a smartphone—requires about 15MB per minute. Hence the 2.2MB per minute average used in these calculations can be considered highly conservative]
Note that these calculations are very conservative. In addition, while YouTube is the biggest, it is certainly not the only video sharing site. There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of them, especially when you include all the porn video sharing sites and the TV streaming sites.
