We rarely do non-product news, but this one is special because it is one piece of entertainment news that correlates to tech. And how so, you ask? Simple. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” scores over 2.1 billion views on Youtube and in the process, it kind of breaks YouTube view counter. Oops. The story goes that the video website’s number of views was in 32-bit integer, which counts up to an astronomical 2,147,483,647 (of views) and that was a-ok before the 2012 Korean language mega hit started to sweep the globe, topping the various medias including iTunes chart, YouTube and some say, Ellen DeGeneres Show. From than until now, its official music video has been watched (at the time of this writing) 2,158,159,770, which means it would have broke the code, so to speak, if Google’s YouTube does not do anything about it (basically, it will just stop displaying the count).
Being Google, naturally, they took action and updated the entire site’s counter software to a 64-bit integer that’s capable of registering over 9 quintillion views, or more precisely, 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 views which should be more than enough for donkey years to come, but good luck trying to reach that eternal number. But do not mistaken this as a flaw. It is not. in fact, this is seen as an achievement by the Mountain View folks (and we would imagine, for Psy too) and naturally, it calls for a celebration, which YouTube did by first shouting about it on YouTube Google+ page and second, subtly putting a special counter on the “Gangnam Style” video page (the official one, that is) that will spins through the view much like a mileage counter on a car whenever a cursor hovers over it. In case you the two year-old “Gangnam Style” hasn’t catches on with you yet, you can view it (and add to its burgeoning number) in the embedded video below.
Image credit: official Psy music video.
via BallerStatus
