Hunter Walk is head of product management YouTube at Google and will deliver an opening day Keynote at Broadband World Forum 2012 on the 16 – 18 October in Amsterdam’s RAI.
He was interviewed by the BWF 2012 team on what has made YouTube the global success it has become and how he sees the video platform evolving in the future.
Walk said: “YouTube has truly become a global living room. Today the YouTube community is more than 850 million monthly visitors. It’ll be a billion-person community quite soon. This has resulted in more than 72 hours of video per minute and four billion hours of video watched per month. What’s really amazing is that growth hasn’t slowed down – there’s an incredible appetite for video.”
And, furthermore, “Well I do think we’re in a unique position to be a global living room, a global classroom and a global town square. There’s no other video platform with similar reach. That enables us to help content owners maximise their audience. It’s why for the last two summer Olympics we’ve worked with the IOC to ensure the games are available in every country. It’s why Bollywood studios have discovered enthusiastic audiences in Estonia. The benefits of not just large audiences but a connection to those viewers— with YouTube Insights every creator can see aggregated data about the demographics of their audience and other helpful analytics—is what makes us so valuable to content producers.
And even, “In July we became the first online video service to support automatic face-blurring – if you upload a video depicting people, you can algorithmically detect and blur all faces via the YouTube Video Editor. In addition to this you’ll see more examples of YouTube apps native to device platforms – such as the PlayStation 3 integration we recently launched.”
