Digital Minute is back for 2015, looking at how Facebook is putting video content at the heart of its growth plans.
Facebook is making big attempts to woo major YouTube vloggers and grow the levels of video content on the platform, and the acquisition of the video compression start-up QuickFire represents another major investment in video content. There's more analysis of this over on our blog.
We also explain how one second has the potential to break the internet.
Video Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the first Digital Minute of 2015. This week, Facebook invests big in video and we explain why one second could break the internet.
Facebook has made another big investment in video content by acquiring the start-up, Quickfire.
Quickfire is a service that quickly compresses a video for users without a noticeable loss in quality. This dramatically reduces bandwidth – a huge time saver for a video-hungry site like Facebook.
Video is a huge growth area for Facebook, with video content increasing 75% last year. The acquisition of Quickfire should allow it to push this growth further, particularly in regions where user bandwidth is scarce.
Could a single second break the internet? Well, that’s the fear over the so-called “leap second”.
Thanks to the slowing rotation of the Earth, June 30th will be one second longer. However, this could be a problem for the internet, as computer clocks could be thrown out of sync with the world’s atomic clocks.
The last leap second, in 2012, caused sites like LinkedIn, Reddit and Foursquare to crash – although the cause of that problem has since been addressed.
Of course, this could be another Y2K scare, but make sure that you keep an eye on your site at one second to midnight on June 30th.
Thanks for watching. I’m Steph Gibson, and that was your Digital Minute.
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