Every Minute, Just About A Days Worth Of Video Is Now Uploaded To YouTube .

The above linked story on TechCrunch caught my eye this morning. It says that nearly 24 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every minute. That is worth repeating: 

Nearly 24 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every minute

That is a staggering number that just blows my mind. The more I think about it the more staggering it becomes. Think for a minute about the time that is involved in just getting this video to a state where the user clicks the upload button and lets Google’s servers process the video from their local computers. Even if a large majority of that video is unedited then that’s still a massively huge number of hours spent around the world as people do simple things like plug their camcorder or point-and-shoot camera into their computers, preview what they have shot, sort the media and/or drag that media from the device to a local drive, log in to You Tube, fill out descriptions and tag the video only then to finally click the upload button, navigate to their selected clip and let the machines churn as the upload happens. Assuming a lot of it comes from connected web cams then that only eliminates a couple of the above steps. Let’s also assume that a lot of this video is “stolen” copyrighted material … which it is. There’s still time and work involved in getting the media out of a DVR, ripped from a DVD, pulled from existing Internet video or converted from a format that already exists. Even if it’s just a click and upload of a single piece of a video and not any ripping or conversion at all then it still takes time. If it takes only a minute then multiply that by the hundreds of thousands of hours that collectively takes in a year’s time and …. whew. And out of all 24 hours of video that is uploaded to You Tube every minute a lot of that video will be edited (though much of it poorly). So that means hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of man hours that has gone into the prep work to get that video ready for upload. Sure, much of that video wasn’t created only for You Tube and much of it is old video that is finding new life on the Internet but time was taken to create it. Time was taken to create all of it.

I think that’s the number that is most overwhelming in this statistic … not the 24 hours of video that goes up every minute or the 30,000 + hours that go up every day but all those hours spent in and around the creation, uploading and tagging of that content. A truly amazing and mind-numbing number indeed.