YouTube: 10 Hours of Content Every Minute

Written by Frank Smith

Thursday, March 13. 2008 at 02:00 AM EDT Post a comment

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NEW YORK -- Media Summit -- During a panel here at the Media Summit yesterday, YouTube Inc. 's Philip Inghelbrecht, strategic partner development manager, dropped this nugget of information: Ten hours of fresh content is uploaded to YouTube every minute.

"If you can't solve the search question quickly enough that's a problem," said Inghelbrecht.

But this explosion of digital content could come at a cost. A study released by IDC sponsored by information management firm EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) found that the total volume of digital content being produced today has exceeded existing storage capabilities. IDC estimates that 281 billion Gbytes were uploaded in 2007, which amounts to about 45 Gbytes of content per each human on earth.

Increased use of digital televisions and camcorders, part of YouTube's stock in trade, is where the greatest amount of this content is coming from. It leads one to wonder if search rather than storage is going to be the biggest hurdle for YouTube to cross in the future.

Search factored in big at the panel Hollywood and the Digital Consumer, with Inghelbrecht suggesting that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) isn't done making big moves in advertising. "If you can solve the search question and then catapult into the advertising business, a Turkish airline can automatically know there's a video of Turkish folklore dance on YouTube and create a bigger market."

But what if this content is owned by someone else? "If the copyright content appears on YouTube or any other Web platform, the knee-jerk reaction is to take it down," said Inghelbrecht. "The person who uploads Entourage is probably the biggest Entourage fan. So the question we ask ourselves is not only how do we detect copyrights but turn them into opportunities?"