Remember YouTube? You could use it to watch baby pandas sneezing, or a kid named David riding home from the dentist hopped up on drugs. YouTube grew into an 800-million-viewer megolith largely on the strength of one-off uploads that were 21st-century versions of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Along the way it spawned its own stars and even series, including Lonelygirl15, The Gregory Brothers, and of course, um, Fred. It spawned its own genres, like reaction videos and unboxing videos. Go to the front page, and it would show you the latest viral hit. And then another. And another. And suddenly, 20 minutes were gone.
But now that’s all changing.
The old YouTube you knew (and maybe loved!) is gone. It’s been replaced by something that’s a lot more like a play-anywhere, device-agnostic, multi-channel network. It’s becoming a cable network for people who don’t have cable. YouTube doesn’t want you to watch videos anymore — not in the singular sense, at least. It wants you to stick around and see what comes next. It wants you to start watching on your phone as you head home from work, pick up again on your TV as you relax in the evening, and then nod off to its content while you’re lying in bed, as it streams from your tablet.
And mostly, YouTube is becoming a backdoor to let Google into your living room, no matter whose set-top box sits on your Ikea MAVA. And so how will YouTube pull this off? Channels.
“The benchmark for what makes mass-market television has changed,” says Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube’s VP of product management. “Cable has run out of space. If you’re going to broadcast content to everybody whether or not they watch it, you can only afford to broadcast a few hundred channels. But if you move to a world where you can broadcast on demand to only whoever wants it, now you can support millions of channels.”
YouTube is moving away from videos and into a world of channels — on the web, Google TV, gaming console, internet-enabled televisions, smartphones, and anything else with a screen and an internet connection. YouTube is even uglyfying its web interface — on purpose — just to make you notice them.
Google also ponied up something in the neighborhood of $300 million to create and promote new channels, lining the pockets of the likes of Madonna and Ashton Kutcher to create original online episodes for the site, while also using algorithms to generate topical channels made from its existing treasure trove of content. It’s a massive shift in strategy, one meant to boost watch times and overall viewers, rather than total view numbers, YouTube’s traditional performance metric. And it all means is that no matter what type of video content you’re into, you’ll be able to find it on YouTube by the bucketful.
Want your MTV? I mean old-school, music videos broadcast all the time? They’re on YouTube, powered by the Vevo channel. Want the best big wave surfing channel on TV? It’s also on YouTube. Or how about the new drama series from Jon Avnet of Black Swan fame? It’s called WIGS, stars A-list actresses like Jennifer Garner and Dakota Fanning, and is only on YouTube.
There’s more. Twilight Zone-style scream-o creepouts? CSI creator Anthony Zuiker has you covered on the YouTube series BlackBox TV. Live videos from the U.S. Olympic team? 24/7 live coverage of Ramadan, straight from Mecca? Original comedy? Original animation? Original automotive TV with attitude? It’s all on YouTube.
But, look, if you do just want to watch cat videos, for hours on end, there’s still a channel for that too. And it’s freaking awesome.
What’s more, YouTube is taking its channels absolutely everywhere it can. Today it’s PlayStation, but tomorrow it’s the world. Your channels will follow you from device to device — be it a gaming platform, a phone, a tablet or a desktop. It wants you to think, “What’s new on TV?” and then turn to your favorite channel on YouTube to find out.
But YouTube also has two problems, and they’re both very big. First, it has to get you to notice the channels. Second, it has to be able to show you the channels, no matter where you are. Here’s how it plans to pull that off.
by Mat Honan, Wired | Read more:
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
