YouTube on Sunday said the number of videos watched daily at the Web site has broken the 2 billion mark as the service begins celebrating its fifth birthday.
“Thanks to you, our site has crossed another milestone and now exceeds over 2 billion views a day,” YouTube team members said in a blog post.
“That’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined,” they wrote.
The news came with the launch of a YouTube 5 Year channel devoted to the service’s history and cultural influence.
The YouTube 5 Year channel features a “My YouTube Story” project compiling tales by people from around the world describing how YouTube has changed or shaped their lives.
A documentary film maker has chronicled stories ranging from an Iranian protester using YouTube to get news to the world to a man sharing a video journal of his battle with cancer.
The channel has an interactive timeline of important moments in YouTube history.
“We never could have predicted what YouTube’s first five years would bring and it’s difficult to imagine what the next five will look like,” the YouTube Team said.
“Five years ago in May, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com,” they said.
San Bruno, California-based YouTube was the brainchild of then PayPal coworkers Chad Hurley, Steve Chen (陳士駿) and Jawed Karim.
Google bought YouTube in a US$1.65 billion deal about 19 months after the online video-sharing service was founded in February of 2005.
The Internet giant has been carefully transforming YouTube into a money-making stage for enjoying works ranging from backyard videos to independent films.
“Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself,” the team said.
Renowned figures such as Vint Cerf, often referred to as the father of the Internet, and TV news anchor Katie Couric have been enlisted to curate playlists of videos in their areas of expertise.
In the scant time since the first video was uploaded to YouTube on April 23, 2005, the Web site has rocketed to global stardom and become a key player in a shift to Internet TV.
“YouTube has the potential to be a very instrumental part of Google’s future TV plan,” Gartner technology analyst Allen Weiner said.
An average of 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute in an amount of content equal to 150,000 full length films over the course of a week.
The Web site boasts content deals with more than 10,000 partners, including entertainment titan Disney, and has a fledgling online movie rental service.
YouTube was started to provide bloggers a way to easily put video in their blogs and blossomed into a hotspot for people to share digitized snippets, Weiner said.
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