San Francisco — Google owned widely popular video-sharing website YouTube today revealed that it has surpassed a new milestone by serving up more than one billion video streams a day. The billion videos announcement was made by YouTube’s Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO in a blog marking the third anniversary of its acquisition by Google.
Hurley noted that the news marks three years to the day that Google bought YouTube, the hugely popular site for 1.65 billion dollars, at a time when it was only serving 100 million streams a day, but today it has evolved from a site dominated by user-generated content to a platform for more professional material.
“Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we have started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we have brought more shows and movies to the site,” Hurley said.
“We wanted to develop a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so,” he said.
According to YouTube statistics the site now offers 42 million video streams every hour or 700,000 every minute. YouTube says that about 70 percent of its traffic originates overseas, with the balance coming from within the United States.
Web measuring firm comScore Inc. reported that U.S. users watched about 10 billion videos over Google — 99% on YouTube — in August. Microsoft and Viacom sites ranked a distance second and third place, respectively, with 546,547 and 539,471 videos views.
What YouTube still lacks, apparently, is earn a profit, despite its immense popularity. Google has admitted the $1.65 billion it paid for YouTube in 2006 was “a premium.” CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted in July as saying he expected YouTube would become profitable at some point.
Meanwhile, YouTube has been negotiating deals with movie studios and is reported to be close to a deal with Channel 4 which will see full-length shows from the station streamed on the site in the UK on YouTube for free in a bid to offer more content attractive to advertisers.
“As we have started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we have brought more shows and movies to the site.”
It announced on Thursday, for example, that the 1976 Martin Scorsese film “Taxi Driver” starring Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster is currently available for US viewers on YouTube’s Crackle channel.
The ad-supported deal would allow users to catch up on the last 30 days of programming.
Hurley Added: We are putting every effort to keep pace with the fastest growing technology to bring you everything you would expect from the world’s largest video site — better quality; a full spectrum of choices and tools for users content partners, and advertisers; and ways to make the YouTube experience your own anywhere anytime.