According to Google YouTube has 2.8 billion users, 5 billion download views a day, 1 billion downloaded hours a day, while 500 hours are uploaded to YouTube each minute
extending far past the 1.3 billion users tracked in 2016.
Just some thoughts, happy to be corrected
Google currently has about 2.5 million servers with YouTube downloads now providing a sizable part of their advertising revenue
Calculations re YouTube Downloads
According to those stats in *April 2026, users download 5 billion videos a day, totalling 1 billion hours (that's 60 billion minutes). That's 3½ million videos a minute, totalling about 41.67 million minutes.
That means one video download is, on average, about 12 minutes, some much more, some get interrupted, some are less.
At an average download speed of, say, 40 mbps, each 12 minute video has an average resolution, a size of, say, 50-100 megabytes (that's 400-800 megabits) and would take about 10-20 seconds to download.
During each streaming minute a YouTube server could be looking after heaps of other clients, say 100 clients each minute.
So the 3½ million clients every minute could then, perhaps, be serviced by 35,000 high speed servers.
*According to a Variety news report, in late 2016 it reached 1 billion hours a day, that's similar to 2026, not saying they reach that every day, but yes, they would need to scale up 10 to 20 times with more high speed servers. I'm assuming servers are monitoring that traffic many times per second.
Regarding uploads
8.33 hours (30,000 seconds) of download viewing time get uploaded every second.
Let's say that involves about 15,000 clients each second, and if each one could get its own dedicated YouTube server, no problems.
Each server should probably be able to handle 5-10 multiple clients, however.
According to Netflix watching TV shows or movies uses about 1 GB of data per hour for each stream of standard definition video, and up to 3 GB per hour for each stream of HD video. If data caps or bandwidth limits are an issue, data usage settings can be adjusted.
In the third quarter of 2017 Netflix reported 109.25 million streaming subscribers worldwide with 52.77 million from the US. Latest figures in 2026 estimate 280 million subscribers with 66 million from the US.
Each Netflix account can feature a maximum of five separate profiles enabling a better individualized recommendation system.
To provide this service it uses over 100,000 Amazon Web Servers
** End of Page