Facebook serves over 1 billion videos in June

Social networking site catching up to YouTube? Not exactly, but pretty impressive either way

One of the neat features on Facebook is how easily you can record a video and send it to a friend or relative.  A few months ago, I was sending a cousin in Spain a Facebook message, wishing them a happy birthday, and with the click of a button, I added a quick video message, right there on the spot, without having to record or compress the video in a separate desktop application, like iMovie or Final Cut Pro would require me to.

 

The ease of sharing videos within Facebook is probably why the company is now seeing over 1 billion video views in the month of June alone.  Although this is nothing compared to what YouTube/Google sees - 1.2 billion video streams/day, it's still significant for a project that came out of a Facebook Hackathon, where Facebook employees stay up all night racing to build a new innovation for the site.  See Facebook's highly produced, slightly cliché video, in which the company compares its first video streaming event to the Apollo 13 Landing, for more details---