I just read this interesting article over at TechCrunch about the amount of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute. In January it was 15 hours/minute, now it's 20 hours/minute. It will soon cross the one day mark. At 20 hours of video it's nearly 50 days of content uploaded every hour and 3.2 years of content every day. If you ever wondered if video on the web was feasible here's the answer. It would take you 23 years to watch all of the content uploaded to YouTube in a single week.
I'm amazed at the amount of manpower that goes into getting this much video uploaded. Even if you discount the content that is never edited or is illegally posted, it's still a lot of work. The bandwidth, storage, and processing power to make the content available online is also staggering.
At Schweitzer we're going to be launching a media player this summer and we've decided to leverage the YouTube platform rather than build our own. We'll put together a wrapper that does search, categories, and a variety of features to make it user friendly, but the playback is all going to be handled by YouTube. It's hands down the largest video distribution platform available.