YouTube has just turned six years old, and has more milestones to report to the world on its relentless growth.
Founded in 2005, YouTube’s ease of use and potential has attracted hundreds of millions of people to the service. The idea that a video in almost any format could be uploaded by the user, and then converted and provided on its own YouTube page (and could be embedded anywhere else) attracted drones of people to the service.
That growth only seems to accelerate for YouTube, which is now reporting that over 48 hours of video is uploaded to the site every single minute. So in just one minute, two whole days of video content has been added to YouTube’s incredibly vast digital vaults.
To compare that to last year, it represents a 100% increase in the amount of content being uploaded at any given time.
All of that content needs viewers to have any purpose on the video sharing giant, and YouTube is now reporting that it delivers 3 billion video views every single day.
Now YouTube is challenging its users to keep up the momentum , so that it can one day in the near future reach 72 hours of video footage per minute, and 4 billion daily views. To help this, the service is constantly making improvements to aid content creators and to provide its service on as many platforms as possible.
Result for: content creators
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has filed another request for the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to give a waiver on the 2003 “plug and play” order which prohibits altering a video stream to disable the analog or digital signal to consumers home theater equipment. The MPAA first made the request in June 2008, but consumer groups such as Public Knowledge opposed the waiver and former FCC Chair Kevin Martin didn’t like the idea either.
The MPAA claims that the waiver, which will allow the use of “selectable output control” (SOC) measures, will enable studios to link up with broadcasters to air pre-DVD releases that will benefit consumers. “Physically challenged or elderly consumers who have limited mobility would have greater choice in movie viewing options,” a filing from the trade group reads.
Pro-consumer groups are not convinced however, largely because the use of SOC will inevitable disable some HDTV’s in the United States when they try to view such broadcasts. Public Knowledge warned that SOC would, “break all eleven million HDTVs in the US that don’t have digital input” and allow the MPAA to control when and how you view content with equipment you have already paid for.
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) went even further and said that as many as 20 million HDTV sets could cease to function as they did when they were bought. Public Knowledge then came back to add that CEA figures are actually a low estimate, because you also have to account for digital video recorders (DVR) and other consumer electronics hardware that can only receive from analog connections.
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Result for: content creators
The French independent labels collecting society SPPF has this week filed a lawsuit against giant video sharing site YouTube, alleging copyright infringement.
The SPPF says that over 100 music videos from its artist catalog are available via the service in some form, and the group wants €10 million in damages.
YouTube refuted the charges however, adding that the “SPPF has not signed up to its Content ID technical measures to identify any infringement.”
“We can’t discuss a pending case but bear in mind that YouTube offers professional content creators and producers powerful and free tools to protect, promote and monetize their content by using Content ID,” says Google. “Many indies as well as major music companies are using these tools to protect their content in France. The protection of copyrights is best achieved by joint efforts between creators and online platforms, not by lengthy and costly lawsuits. SPPF have not used Content ID to protect their content on the platform so far, although several independent labels do.”
