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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

> more films than you could possibly watch in your lifetime

I was curious if this statement was true...

So assuming, 4.4 GB her HD film & 2 hrs long each, you can fit roughly 232 films per TB or 232,000 films total (for 1000 TB), that's 464,000 hours of HD content or 53 years (!) back to back.

So, yes, that statement is true. Now the next logical question: Has the human race produced 464,000 hours of video content?

Let's assume there are around 100 cable channels showing content in HD video 24/7 (with no overlap, there are more but a lot of duplication). That's 2,400 hours of content a day, 876,000 hours a year or 101 years back-to-back worth of watchable content shown each year.

But realistically that will be at least 70% duplication (particularly looking at it over several years). So even if we just look at 24/7 news and shopping channels which always produce original content, you're still talking about easily 200,000+ hours/year.

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> Has the human race produced 464,000 hours of video content?

Far more than that... YouTube alone claims "100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute":

https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

...which comes out to 144kh/day. In other words, one of these discs would be enough to store ~3 days worth of contributions to YouTube. So a box of these discs, let's say 1000 of them - which isn't all that big (e.g. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Neo-Aluminium-Storage-1000-sleeves/d... ), could hold an archive of every single video that has ever been uploaded to YouTube.

I am now reminded of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_UmWdcTrrc

Edit: got beaten to mentioning YouTube, but there's many other video sharing sites on the Internet, and of course there are probably countless hours of one of the types of video the Internet is well known for: porn.

The majority of that is junk anyways. But I suppose some people obsessed with archiving everything wouldn't filter anything. If I were to grab "everything" from YouTube I would at least limit it to subscriptions and only subscribe to channels that don't upload bogus junk.

Then the valuable commodity would become directories of worthwhile content. You would have people doing deep dives into the crap to find the locations of a few good pieces to share with their buddies or trade.

With the internet and Video On Demand that's already the case.

https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html claims "100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute"

So, that would be 4,640 minutes or less than a week. Lower quality, and probably with (near) duplicates, but I guess it is safe to say we have that amount of video.

Another way to look at it: I expect we produce more content in unique wedding videos every year (at an hour each, that takes half a million weddings or a million people marrying. At an average of one marriage per life and a life expectancy of 75 year, that takes a population of 75 million people)

> So assuming, 4.4 GB her HD film & 2 hrs long each

People bitch constantly, but a typical feature film encoded by YIFY at 720p will clock in at somewhere between 650-900 megs, leaning towards the lower end of that range.

Not that it matters, the rest of your math makes it look ridiculous. Without too many tradeoffs, you could certainly put every American (Hollywood and indie both) film on such a disc.

> Now the next logical question: Has the human race produced 464,000 hours of video content?

Somewhere Google has a gauge that shows how many hours of videos they store... but I can't find it.

> So even if we just look at 24/7 news and shopping channels which always produce original content, you're still talking about easily 200,000+ hours/year.

Agreed. But I don't think that they have archival policies in place where everything is kept permanently. Even the news channels may have been in the habit of dumping everything but stuff deemed important, well into the 1990s.

>Let's assume there are around 100 cable channels showing content in HD video 24/7 (with no overlap, there are more but a lot of duplication). That's 2,400 hours of content a day, 876,000 hours a year or 101 years back-to-back worth of watchable content shown each year.

I'm thinking that 100 channels provide exactly 100 years worth of content per year instead of 101. Unless you rewind the good parts :-p

And there are of course vastly more than a 100 cable channels. BSkyB alone broadcasts more than 600 channels for the UK market (more than a thousand if you include radio). In 2010 Ofcom passed 1000 licensed UK channels.

The US is supposedly the only other country with similarly high number of channels, but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that there are more than 10,000 channels worldwide.

> more films than you could possibly watch in your lifetime

>> Let's assume there are around 100 cable channels showing content in HD video 24/7

Note that this is comparing HD content to films, though I still think you are fine in saying we easily have enough content. :)

http://www.imdb.com/stats

Seems to be rather likely.

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