YouTube users watch more than a BILLION hours of footage every day … and is set to overtake TV viewing
YouTube uses artificial intelligence to recommend personalised videos to users
YouTube users are now watching more than one billion hours of footage every day - and are on course to overtake TV viewership.
The online TV service said that the figure is far higher than it had expected and comes after a period of unprecedented growth.
YouTube said that the one billion hours represents a tenfold increase since 2012.
The amount of video that people upload to YouTube is now a staggering 400 hours every minute, or 65 years of video a day.
The figures show the dominance of YouTube and how Google is obliterating all other online viewing platforms.
Google, which owns YouTube, is using aggressive artificial intelligence to recommend personalised videos to users and embedding YouTube results in Google searches.
The YouTube app is also pre-installed on Google's Android operating system, the most popular in the world.
According to statistics released by YouTube, the service now has one billion users, which is almost one-third of all people on the Internet.
Two billion people now watch at least one YouTube video every three months, far more than the 1.2 billion who tune into the world’s largest TV network, China Central Television.
Facebook and Netflix do not come close to such numbers.
They revealed in January 2016 that their users watch 100 million hours and 116 million hours respectively each day on their platforms.
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But they are expected to grow massively too and at this rate Internet viewership may equal traditional TV viewership by around 2020, according to industry analysts Zenith.
In the US, data from Nielsen shows that Americans watch on average roughly 1.25 billion hours of live and recorded TV a day, a figure steadily dropping in recent years.
The switch to online is fueled by services like Amazon and Netflix commissioning their own original content including the Emmy and Golden Globe winning TV show Transparent.
Netflix produced House of Cards, the political drama starring Kevin Spacey, and YouTube is offering YouTube Red, a paid service with no adverts and access to exclusive content.
Viewers love these shows because they don’t have adverts, they can watch them on demand and are free to binge watch one episode after another.
YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan said: ‘The corpus of content continues to get richer and richer by the minute, and machine-learning algorithms do a better and better job of surfacing the content that an individual user likes."
In the UK the trend towards more viewing online is the same as in America and between 2014 and 2015 viewers nearly doubled the amount of time they spent watching Netflix and Amazon.
According to TV industry marketing body Thinkbox, the average viewer in the UK watched 77 minutes a week of video-on-demand services in 2015.
That was nearly twice the 40 minutes a week on average in 2014.
Huge-Tube
One billion - how many hours of video YouTube viewers are watching each day
400 hours - how much video is uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE
65 years - how much video is uploaded to YouTube every DAY
Two billion - the number of users who watch at least one YouTube video every three months
1.2 billion - viewership of the world’s largest TV network, China Central Television.
1927 - first TV demonstration by San Francisco inventor Philo Taylor Farnsworth.
2005 - the year YouTube was founded