Charbax.com

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt just said Google is delivering 1.3 million minutes of videos on youtube every minute. Source is the second video on this page: http://cnbc.com/id/26182232

Which basically means Youtube has a constant bandwidth output average of 390 gbit/s if you consider each Youtube stream is at 300kbit/s and that more and more of the streams are in “high quality mode” which uses a bit more bandwidth and some of Youtube’s videos are delivered in H264 to devices like the iphone, Tivo, Apple TV and stuff like that.

So my estimates were way low.

That 1.3 million number basically means Youtube constantly has the equivalent of 1.3 million viewers. Which might be low compared to any big established TV station, but it’s huge considering the Youtube infrastructure provides a different customized on-demand stream to every user.

Let’s guess that the average Youtube view is something like 3 minutes long. Divide 24 hours by 3 minutes, you’ve got 480 times 1.3 million views on Youtube in average per day. That amounts to a current average of 624 million views on youtube per day. When Google acquired Youtube, there was about 100 million views on Youtube per day, so if the numbers are true, Google might have increased Youtube’s bandwidth by more then 6 times since they acquired Youtube about two years ago.

One source said average Youtube user watches something like 40 videos on Youtube per month.

So if that statistic of 40 views per user average per month is true, Youtube would have 468 million different users watching over 18 billion videos on Youtube each month. Which would mean each Youtube user watches in average 2 hours of videos on Youtube each month, which still would be low compared to the average 90 hours that the average person in USA watches TV each month (3 hours in average per American per day).

A constant 390gbit/s average bandwidth stream from Youtube would mean that Youtube uses 126 petabytes of bandwidth each month.

If Google is paying as much as $0.10 in average per GB delivered, they are probably paying less then that, but let’s say the worldwide average may be $0.10 per GB, considering there are lots of storage and networking equipment that they have to constantly add to their big Youtube server farms, then at 126 petabytes per month, Youtube’s bandwidth costs might be around 10 million dollars per month right now.

If you consider Internet Video-On-Demand might replace traditionnal TV at some point, Youtube might still have a potential to expand by a hundred times when that transition happens. And all the while people will require the videos to be delivered in HD quality directly onto people’s HDTVs using a Video-On-Demand set-top-box which will consume 10 times as much bandwidth with at least 3.5mbit/s per 720p HD quality video stream. So potentially Youtube’s bandwidth consumption could increase by 1000 times during that transition.