hmmmmmm, okay.... I might be a n00b here with math and stuff. But billions of hours?
Netflix US, that has more content than SA as far as I know, only runs around 36000 hours worth of content (2020 data)
DSTV doesn't have on-demand content, so per channel, the max hours they can get in a month is 744 (this unfortunately includes advertising as I don't want to run on the average runtime per tv episode/series/movies as they all have different run times)
DSTV currently has 180 channels (yes I'm including the audio only ones), which is 133920 hours per month but includes repeats which doesn't generally make that number seem huge at all....
Same with Amazon Prime, running roughly 36000 hours worth of content available per streaming channel. Less for Showmax, but lets also use the 36000 hour mark. Hell, lets double all the on-demand streaming content hours available (which isn't realistic for the region, but since we have BILLIONS of hours to work with:
Now sure, the author includes YouTube here.... which is user generated content and doesn't really include any shows, so I can see where the "billions" come from in this regard. 500 hours per minute is uploaded to YouTube, roughly 262800000 hours (262 million) per year or 21900000 (21 million) hours per month. This of course only accounts for new content uploaded.
However, since there is no need for YouTube Premium, I'm assuming they are only referencing the shows made for YouTube Premium (some of which are on other streaming platforms like Netflix)
This cuts down the number of hours of content available drastically on YouTube, since now we're not counting user generated content.
So, currently they have 221 shows (some of them are in development), most of which averages around 11 minutes in content, but lets be generous and work on the longest running time of 60 minutes per episode (instead of an average). Most of them are 1 season / 8 episodes in length, with a few in the 2nd season
But lets make that 4 seasons, 16 episodes each @ 60 minutes an episode (since we need to reach billions of hours)
YouTube premium comes in at 14144 hours of content available
3 on-demand streaming channels: 216000 hours
YouTube Premium: 14144 hours
DSTV Channels: 133920 hours (per month, which is in total, and this is total broadcast time, not total content available as I indicated earlier)
This brings my napkin math and about 30 minutes worth of research to a total of 364064 hours
That's three hundred sixty-four thousand sixty-four. No million, no billion.
Still, 41 years worth of content available to you to stream, but BILLIONS????
GTFO