Google to Revamp YouTube With ‘Channels’
Google Inc.'s YouTube video website is working on a major site overhaul to organize its content around “channels” as it positions itself for the rise of Internet-connected televisions that allow people to watch online video in their living rooms, according to people familiar with the matter.
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands seven months after Google shifted its troubled TV effort onto YouTube in October 2010, making the video site the company's main vehicle for the living room rather than the standalone Google TV platform. The channels plan is the product-side follow-through: instead of competing head-on with pay-TV hardware, Google would rebuild YouTube's catalog into something that looks like programming.
The groundwork was laid within weeks of this story: YouTube confirmed its acquisition of Web production shop Next New Networks in March 2011 — its biggest move into professionally produced content — alongside licensed video-processing technology from Green Parrot Pictures, while Fortune's pickup of the same WSJ reporting put the price of an original-content push at $100 million. Against 35 hours of uploads every minute and a January 2011 homepage redesign meant to fix a front page users found impersonal, the channel structure is how Google proposes to impose editorial order on scale.
First-order effects
- Professional content producers and studios gain a funded buyer: if the reported $100 million materializes, Google becomes an anchor client for original Web series, with Next New Networks' team positioned to recruit and package channel partners.
Second-order effects
- Cable networks and premium content owners suddenly have a free, ad-supported rival bidding for the same writers and formats, forcing them to decide whether to license into YouTube channels or treat them as competition for living-room attention.
Third-order effects
- If channels make YouTube navigable like a program guide, connected-TV makers get a stronger reason to ship YouTube prominently, accelerating the migration of ad budgets from broadcast schedules to Web-distributed 'channels' — and setting up the question of whether Google eventually charges for premium tiers.
The trend: Internet video is reorganizing from an infinite clip archive into scheduled, professionally packaged channels as screens shift from desks to living rooms.