Sunday, December 7, 2014

"Gangnam Style" Kinda, Sorta Broke YouTube

The world has collectively watched this guy 2.1 billion times
Today's earworm attack news: Psy's "Gangnam Style" almost broke YouTube.

Or at least their system of counting how many times a video has been viewed.

Inexplicably, the "Gangnam" video was viewed more than 2 billion times, and YouTube had to make some quick readjustments to accommodate all those views, says the BBC. 

YouTube used a 32-bit integer, a unit to represent data in computer architecture, and under that system, the most views a YouTube video could get was 2,147,483,647.

One would think a video featuring a pudgy Korean pop star would not be watched more that 2.1 billion times, but one would be wrong.

Now that YouTube has fixed its view counter so that even the most obsessed people on the planet can watch the same video over and over again for the next 60 years,  the most any video could be watched is 9,223,372,036,814,775,808 times.

How's that for precision?

I really hope we don't all watch "Gangnam Style" 9.2 quintillion times.

The BBC has also noted that the world has collectively wasted more than 16,000 years watching "Gangnam Style" instead of doing something more productive, like curing cancer, ending terrorism or stopping the discussion of Kim Kardashian's butt on the Internet.

Anyway, Psy fans, watch "Gangnam Style" until you drop. You probably won't break YouTube's view counter again. We can all breathe a sigh of relief on that one.

No comments:

Post a Comment