In the race to take over the world, it seems like YouTube recently took some huge strides: in the past eight months, it's seen a 25 percent increase in videos (now at 4 billion), and users upload an hour of video per second. Oh, and it had more than one trillion playbacks in 2011.

If you're unfamiliar with just how many a trillion is, it looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000. Yeah, lots of zeroes.

Google, always happy to show off its accomplishments, has created this page so you know just how popular its child, YouTube, is.

With numbers like this, YouTube is en route to unseat television. It just become a question of content, and where you can get it.

YouTube has wasted no time, as it's already had talks to broadcast NBA games, and there's no way they stop with basketball. Not to mention Google chairman Eric Schmidt touring the world and speaking with Disney and other TV executives about the future of television (which he envisions will include Google TV).

What happens next is yet to be seen, obviously, but YouTube breaking the one trillion playback mark (did anyone even know this was a benchmark that could possibly be surpassed?!) is news indeed, and this next year should be an interesting one for televised and/or recorded content.

We'll just keep sitting on our lazy butts, watching. Pass the popcorn.

Source: Dvice

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