The figure is almost twice the combined number of people who watch the three prime time television stations in the US, according to Google.

The news comes as the website celebrates the day when its first beta version was launched fiver years ago.

Chad Hurley, who co-founded the site, said to BBC News that he sees a great opportunity of growth in the video market on the Internet and they are positioning themselves as a leader.

”We are a stage and we give everyone in the world an opportunity to participate and that is being a video platform for creating a solution for people to not only upload and distribute their videos on a global basis but to find and share videos“, he added.

While the two billion hits per day marked a milestone, Hurley said they feel they can still go further.

He said two billion video streams is a huge number but on the average, people are just spending 15 minutes per day on the site in comparison to the five hours they spend every day watching television.

”I don’t think we could have ever planned or imagined we would get to the scale or the size we are today. We were mostly trying to create a video solution for ourselves based on our own frustrations“, said Hurley, adding that they are proud of what they have achieved to date but they have still much work to do.

YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006. Only seven months ago, it saw one billion downloads per day.

Whilst much of the American governments statistics are available on the website and allow developers to use the data in any way they choose, Mr Kundra called for further transparency of information. “Imagine a world where you have a YouTube for data where anyone of us could slice and dice this data and share it with our family, friends and policymakers.” His views come as the Obama administration continue with plans to allow the public more access to U.S citizens, in particular with the development of ‘Opinion Space’, a platform allowing for people to discuss their views on U.S foreign policy.

Meanwhile, after the May 2009 launch of data.gov, Mr Kundra said “Consider how much data the government has. By democratising we put information in the hands of citizens so that they can make better decisions and fundamentally change the way we deliver services.” Calling on developers to instigate more transparency and create public services such as the army’s latest scheme ‘apps for the army’ he added that there was also the possibility to create new industry sectors and job positions. “New businesses will be created that we cannot imagine today. New services will be deployed and the public will have greater transparency to participate in the democratic institutions in ways that they could have never imagined before,” he said.

As Richard Thomas, former Information Commissioner in the UK said that the conviction gave a “bad name” to privacy laws, it was confirmed that David Drummond, George De Los Reyes and Peter Fleisher had all been convicted. Meanwhile the court acquitted colleague Arvind Desikan.

Quickly responding to the move chief legal officer at Google David Drummond said “I intend to vigorously appeal this dangerous ruling. It sets a chilling precedent. If individuals like myself and my Google colleagues who had nothing to do with the harassing incident, its filming or its uploading onto Google Video can be held criminally liable solely by virtue of our position at Google, every employee of any internet hosting service faces similar liability.”

The fall out from the ruling is likely to have huge global consequences to all providers who offer internet content. Uploaded to Google Video in 2006, before the internet giant acquired YouTube, the firm explained that attempting to pre-screen content for hugely popular YouTube was impossible. Whilst lawyers for the company argued that not only was the content removed as soon as the video was brought to their attention, but they had also provided information on the uploaders. However, prosecutors continued to argue that privacy laws in Italy had been broken because consent was not sought from all individuals featured in the clip.

Writing on the blog, deaf software engineer Ken Harrenstien explained “The majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me.” Whilst YouTube already offers video producers the option to include manual captioning, very few actually use it. Combing automatic speech recognition with the system which is already in place for video makers to use, the technology is in its initial stages with certain translations not correct, but Mr Harrenstien added that it would continually improve.

Meanwhile Google’s vice president Vint Cerf, who wears a hearing aid due to experiencing hearing difficulties, added “One of the big challenges of the video medium is whether it can be made accessible to everyone.”

Elsewhere YouTube also revealed the launch of its new system, YouTube Direct. Aimed specifically towards the media industry, the direct feed allows for amateur videos surrounding newsworthy events including weather conditions or protests, directly to readers inboxes. Subscribers of the feeds will be able to obtain contact details of video uploaders, with trials currently ongoing with a select group of US websites, newspapers and radio stations.

Whilst several cases of YouTube providing unlicensed content has already been wrapped up, the newly brought claims may prove to be particularly turbulent because the rights to some content involved is owned by multiple individuals. Claiming that more than 125 million page views have cost huge income losses, the 25 producers, musicians and publishers say that detailed sever logs need to be handed over by YouTube so that they can discover both who watched and who uploaded content to the video sharing website. Unable to target their consumer groups because of unlicensed material being viewed, the group claim that related income loss due to fans not having to buy material, has lost vast amounts of revenue.

Before the claim can actually be taken to court and placed before a judge, German authorities have had to become involved due to the complex nature of the case. Whilst going against every advertising rule in the book, the claimants are essentially looking to sue their own fan base for viewing unlicensed content rather than purchasing material. It is now the German authority’s decision to justify this cause of action before any legal moves can be made.

In addition advertising will be sold around the shows, with the channel estimated to take a 70per cent cut of the profits, whilst they can also sell advertising slots on video’s that they have not uploaded themselves. Running for a pilot of three years, the two companies said that the YouTube/Channel 4 collaboration would look very much like the channels online website, with added YouTube branding.

With most content being online by 2010, YouTube’s owner Google said “Over the past few years, fans have had access to increasing amounts of professional programming online as TV companies experiment with new ways of distributing their content.” Global Sales Operations and Business Development president Nikesh Arora added that “Channel 4 have been visionary in their online strategy and are consistently at the forefront of new uses of YouTube to engage their viewers and unlock new revenue streams. This significant new agreement brings Channel 4’s great full length content to the YouTube community, helping Channel 4 to grow their online revenues and to continue to invest in the creation of high quality original content.”

Meanwhile chief executive of Channel 4, Andy Duncan said “Channel 4 was the first broadcaster anywhere in the world to make all its commissioned content available online and we’ve consistently pioneered in this field. It demonstrates our ability to strike dynamic commercial partnerships to help underpin our future as a commercially funded, not-for-profit multi-platform public service network.”

Buying the site in 2006 for $1.65bn Google later stated that the price tag had been “a premium”. Earlier this year YouTube was brought into disrepute when it found itself in a row over content. Millions of music videos were scrapped from the UK site over criticism that Google did not pay the music artists any royalties for hosting the official videos. Whilst a number of recording labels allowed their content to be shown anyway, the majority of videos disappeared from servers until last month when the row was brought to a conclusion. Google agreed that content should be paid for and gave an undisclosed sum of money to the UK’s PRS for Music, the royalty collecting group.

Founding the website in 2004, Mr Hurley joined forces with Jawed Karim and Steve Chen to create the website which now receives a billion hits a day. Meeting when they all worked for PayPal, Mr Hurley said “We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an internet connection can share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases they can make a living from doing so.”

Google, the world’s number one search engine company, have revealed investment deals in video compression technology. Reporting to have spent an enormous $106.5m on On2 Technologies, Google seems to be paving the way to reduce the amount of immense space that YouTube takes up.

Revealing the investment on their blog, Google remained non committal on their reasons for making such a huge step into video compression. They said “video is an important part of many people’s everyday activities on the internet and a big part of many Google products. Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform. To that end, we’re happy to announce today that we’ve signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology.”

It seems more than likely that the acquisition is related directly to the sheer volume of space that YouTube currently holds. Users can upload files with a maximum size of 2GB, and with approximately 20 hours of footage uploaded per minute, the expansive nature of the world renowned video site is vast. Add a $360million bill for bandwidth costs each year, and surely Google are looking for ways to reduce their outgoings.

It may also set the way for the recent announcement that YouTube are about to embark on hosting full length video’s and episodes. With an enormous amount of content, and therefore file size about to be added to their directory, and On2 Technologies recognition that they aim to bring “faster encodes, easier playback, smaller files, faster download times, reduced stream buffer delays and lower bandwidth cost”, it seems Google’s latest acquisition was a long time coming.