Post the great session by Twitter earlier in the day, it was now the turn of YouTube to take centre stage in the afternoon session. Google/YouTube Asia Pacific (Singapore), director – head of YouTube partnerships and operations, Gautam Anand made a brief presentation on ‘Fundamentals of Digital Programming’.
YouTube as an online video streaming platform has really come off age in the recent past, from being a video sharing community primarily in the US to becoming one of the (if not ‘the’) largest content platforms globally.
“We currently have over a billion unique visitors logging on every month, consuming over 6 billion hours of content on a monthly basis,” informed Gautam. “And not just that the rate at which content is being contributed to the site, has grown phenomenally; from just over 100 hours every minute in 2013 to over 300 hours this year.”
He further spoke about the reach of YouTube. It is available in 73 countries, in over 61 languages and has changed from being a primarily US specific platform to now having over 80 per cent of content coming from across the globe across all genres.
Gautam added: “I guess the medium of content dissemination has also evolved along with what the consumers’ desire. In the 1980s where we had only four channels to choose from, through broadcast signals; to over hundreds of channels by 2010 through cable distribution; to over 1,000 plus web video channels by 2020.”
He ended his presentation by showing some of the trends of how videos have gone viral across the globe because they had the sharing ability, were conversational and interactive videos that were targeted for the general audience and were language or region neutral in nature.
And taking the conversation forward on viral videos, Gautam was joined on stage by FungBros Comedy, online content producers, Andrew and David Fung from US and Night Owl Cinematics, online content producers, Ryan Tan and Sylvia Chan from Singapore. 
During the course of their conversation the panel touched upon various topics ranging from what kinds of content work on the web, how important is comedy or humour for viralising a particular video, to making videos around current trends and using other social media platforms to promote the video content.
“The idea is to keep short and snappy content for users to really just enjoy it during breaks, we also use a lot of music to engage with our followers,” explained the FungBros. Ryan and Sylvia also agreed with the brothers and added: “It is very important to constantly keep changing the way we create videos as the viewers nowadays are very easily bored. It is also a necessity to continually incorporate newer elements as well as use Meta tags and keywords for better visibility.”
The panel further discussed a lot more on bandwidth constraints being an issue in underdeveloped countries and looking to improve the situation in those regions and encourage them to also consume a lot more content digitally.
