Each day in India’s capital, New Delhi, hundreds of thousands of people take a quiet subway across the crowded suburbs to reach their work. The relative calm is interrupted every few minutes as the train reaches a station and an ever-growing population jostles to find a seat. Seconds later, everyone returns their attention to their smartphone screen, resuming the comedy sketch they were watching on YouTube.
More than 7,500 miles away, executives at Netflix are scrambling for new strategies to court this audience. Earlier this year, CEO Reed Hastings, who has identified sleep as the biggest competition to his service on multiple occasions, wondered out loud if the next 100 million Netflix subscribers are in India.
They probably are, but YouTube, not sleep, has already claimed them.
The story posits that YouTube is overtaking Netflix because it is more mobile-friendly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @03:09PM
Just direct a botnet to "watch" YouTube, and thereby drain Google of its resources.
Also, how many people use YouTube to fall asleep, like TV of yore? It used to be a feature to have a TV that would start a countdown every so often, and then shut itself off unless interrupted. YouTube has the same idea, I suppose, but it's even more important for them, because that's one less connection they need to handle.