YouTube Tops 2bn Downloads A Day

Five years since its launch, Google-owned video network YouTube now exceeds two billion views per day, according to the company’s blog.

By giving people a platform on which to upload and share their videos, YouTube has become the first place for film-makers and politicians, as well as members of the public, to broadcast themselves and make their voices heard. Since the first beta version of YouTube.com launched in May 2005, it has grown to the point where it draws nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined.

“What started as a site for bedroom bloggers and viral videos has evolved into a global platform that supports HD and 3D, broadcasts entire sports seasons live to 200+ countries,” wrote the YouTube team. “We bring feature films from Hollywood studios and independent filmmakers to far-flung audiences. Activists document social unrest seeking to transform societies, and leading civic and political figures stream interviews to the world.”

However, despite having reached the phenomenal milestone of two billion downloads a day, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley believes the company can go further.

“Two billion video streams is a large number but on average people are only spending 15 minutes a day on the site compared to five hours a day watching TV,” Hurley told BBC News. “We are proud of what we have achieved so far but we have a lot of work ahead.”

Google’s future in video

Earlier this year Google teamed up with Intel and Sony to work on Google TV – a platform and service that will funnel search, video, Twitter and other web applications through set-top boxes and onto televisions. The news came only days after Google was reported to be testing a service to run TV, web video from YouTube and other applications from a set-top box based on Google’s Android operating system.

However, Gartner analyst Van Baker seemed unimpressed with the idea. “Consumers have repeatedly rejected these solutions,” he wrote on his blog on 18 March. “Consumers have a perfectly good platform for accessing the Internet and that is the personal computer. Bringing PC-style access to the television is just not appealing to consumers.”

Free software campaigners have also been calling on Google to use its purchase of video specialist On2 in March to promote open video formats, and give users an alternative to proprietary formats and software such as Adobe’s Flash.

“YouTube is the world’s largest video site, home to nearly every digital video ever made,” wrote the Free Software Foundation in an open letter to the company. “If YouTube merely offered a free format as an option, that alone would bring support from a slew of device makers and applications.”