You may recall that I’ve mentioned that I really enjoy watching YouTube lately. Well, I think I said I had recently become addicted to the channel, and that’s still true. I believe it’s because that instead of watching cop, fire, or medical shows – which is what watching broadcast television consists of today – this is all original content. And by original I mean on pretty much any subject anyone can think of at anytime.

I used to think of YouTube as a way to find out how to do quick and easy home or car or almost anything repairs. I still use it for that as well but I never realized how entertaining the content can be and yes, even educational – some of it academic, most of what I see though are interested amateurs, like most of us.

Not only that, but I can see the news there as well. Not just news though, but an analysis from someone about something that’s going on somewhere in the world that none of us get to hear about on a regular basis because it doesn’t fit our domestic media’s narrative. Sure, there’s a lot of liberal and conservative views. But at least I can watch both and am able to see some issue or story from a perspective I had possibly never considered before.

There’s a downside as I’ve already mentioned. Yes, YouTube has become my go-to for viewing television. Because of its variety. In fact, it’s on my T.V. right now as I’m scribbling this about it. It may even know. Which may or may not be a concern. I do hacvw a problem with their algorithm because if I watch two or three shows by different content creators on the same subject (say, home renovation), all of a sudden, YouTube is squirting out a dozen videos and of course, because I may not have watched another subject in a few days, it drops that from my recommendations.

I was wondering exactly how much content is on YouTub. A lot I figured. How long has this platform been around anyway? I had to do some research. Well, an AI bot did the research for me. Sure I probably could have found out wwhat I wanhted in ten or fifteen minutes, but this AI bot (Googles) gave me everything I wanted (mostly) in ten seconds.

YouTube has been around since 2005, according to the bot. I have to believe that until i decide (or someone tells me) it’s not true. So that’s a lot of videos over the past two decades and it makes sense that there’d be a huge amount on content on the platform over all thse years. Unless they archive older video, like from 2005. That I don’t know but I have the impression from the data I was shown that YouTube has it ll online. Here’s a few facts.

There are over 500 hours of content uploaded every minute of every day to YouTube. That comes to over 30,000 hors, every hour, which translates to 720,000 hours per day. If a person were to sit down and watch back to back videos of one days worth of content, it would take around 82 years. Google won’t say how much content it has collected overall, but the estimates are as much as 15 exabytes. In case you’re unaware, an exabyte is a billion gigabytes (a billion, billion bytes). That’s a lot of DIY videos as well as anything anyone could possibly contemplate.

I think it’s now YouTube tht wears the big britches today. Broadcast networks and yes the over crowded cable stations, are passé.