YouTube Exceeds Two Billion Views Per Day
YouTube has announced that it has reached a new milestone, serving over two billion views per day:
Today, thanks to you, our site has crossed another milestone: YouTube exceeds over two billion views a day. That’s nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.
What started as a site for bedroom vloggers and viral videos has evolved into a global platform that supports HD and 3D, broadcasts entire sports seasons live to 200+ countries. We bring feature films from Hollywood studios and independent filmmakers to far-flung audiences. Activists document social unrest seeking to transform societies, and leading civic and political figures stream interviews to the world.
YouTube has been the biggest success story of the new media revolution, but they’re aiming higher, gunning for traditional TV audiences:
Although the average user spends 15 minutes a day on YouTube, that’s tiny compared to the five hours a day people spend watching TV. Clearly, we need to give you more reason to watch more videos! And we want to give you all the tools and support to make YouTube both your career and your community. After all, this is only the beginning of the video revolution. We’re just getting started.
To do that, YouTube is going to need to need to attract long-form content and remove some of the barriers that keep people from sitting back and watching for longer periods of time.
Posted in: General
'Historic' Day as First Non-Latin Web Addresses Go Live
Arab nations are leading a “historic” charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.
Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called “country codes” written in Arabic scripts. The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil.
More than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann). It said the new domains were “available for use now” although it admitted there was still some work to do before they worked correctly for everyone. However, it said these were “mostly formalities”.
Icann’s senior director for internationalised domain names, Tina Dam, told BBC News that this has been “the most significant day” since the launch of the internet, adding that “it’s been a very big day for Icann, more so for the three Arabic countries that were the first to be introduced”.
Icann president Rod Beckstrom described the change as “historic”.
Source: BBC News
Posted in: General
