… on one single platform.

The Youtube official blog, announced it today/yesterday (depending on your timezone).

“last year, we hit a big milestone on that journey: people around the world are now watching a billion hours of YouTube’s incredible content every single day!
Let’s put that in perspective. If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years. 100,000 years ago, our ancestors were crafting stone tools and migrating out of Africa while mammoths and mastodons roamed the Earth.”

That is a phenomenal amount of content consumed. you are looking at an average of 2.5 hours per user . Assuming 4 billion people on the net, all of them consuming everyday. We all know that the number of users is likely to be far lower. Given, that many of the videos’ are shorts (under 10 minutes), you are talking about a lot of viewing.

Last year, while researching how much content was being create on the interwebs, and the various kinds of content that was being created – for something i was working on _ i came across this.

 

it is awesome, and awe inspiring. It also tells you the sheer amounts of potential information overload we all face, if we even consumed a fraction of it. And, yet we do.

It is the same case with the real world. Michael Bhaskar, in his book Curation: The power of selection in a world of excess points out

a study from UCLA’s Center on the Everyday Lives of Families. Their report, Life at Home in the 21st Century, found a state of ‘material saturation’ in the lives of the families they worked with. They had, on average, 139 toys, 438 books and magazines and 39 pairs of shoes each.3 Even the smallest home in the study had over 2,260 items in three rooms. They concluded that Americans are living amidst ‘extraordinary clutter’. Stuffocation even manifests itself physiologically – the more clutter people, especially women, had, the higher their stress levels. All that resource and productivity of the Boom and, after a certain point, all it does is stress us out.

I haven’t seen such a study in India, but i know it applies here too (for many of us). Yes, we do have a first world problem, we have too much. i notice it everytime i clean out the cupboard, the stuff inside intimidates me to such a level, i put it all back and run away. But, the fact remains, I know my life will be less cluttered if I got rid of 70% of all the things I own, and no longer use.

While the overload in the real world is high, it is nothing compared to the overload we face online. It is just very easy to while away hours at a go, on random content consumption. Whether it is “window shopping” on an e-commerce site, or checking out new videos on Youtube; be it catching up with friends on FB, or figuring who is burning what on twitter. I am not even adding activities like viewing structured entertainment on an Amazon Prime or a Nextflix; or even conventional linear TV. Just digital. And, India has not yet seriously begun adding to the content glut on line.

Right now, without India being fully unleashed digitally, there are 400 hours of new video every minute, close to 10,000 hours of new video every day. 3.6 million hours of video every year. And, that is only one platform. There is of course, something for everyone, if only they can find it 🙂