TV over the internet is providing an alternative to Freeview and Sky.
It’s the go-to place on the web for user-generated videos, but YouTube will take a serious stab at becoming a fully fledged internet-TV provider this month when it rolls out the first of what will be dozens of dedicated content channels.
YouTube will stump up US$100 million – small change for its owner, Google – to pay production companies to make shows to screen exclusively at scheduled times during the week as live feeds on the YouTube site. It’s counting on celebrity pulling-power to make its investment pay off.
Madonna (DanceOn), Ashton Kutcher (Katalyst Thrash Lab) and former NBA basketball star Shaquille O’Neill (the Comedy Shaq Network) will host channels on YouTube, eventually providing 25 hours of new content a day across the network.
In case it sounds a bit like MTV meets the Comedy Channel, more high-minded fare is also on offer. The people behind the hugely popular TEDTalks series will have a channel, as will online magazine Slate, news agency Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. Gaming network IGN will feature and movie company Lionsgate will also provide content.
YouTube is available on every screen, from a laptop to an iPad, a mobile phone and even a TV screen equipped with a web browser. And unlike Hulu, Netflix and Amazon, which restrict their content to viewers in the US, YouTube is taking the channels global. “They’ll be available to you on any internet-connected device, anywhere in the world, with all the interactivity and social features of YouTube built right in,” says YouTube’s global head of content partnerships, Robert Kyncl.
It will have a decidedly US flavour – at least initially. But although YouTube is unlikely to open its cheque book to fund New Zealand content channels any time soon, the move from the world’s biggest online video provider does offer a glimpse at the future of TV – where content is delivered via the internet and tightly integrated with social media.
So, why is Google going all Hollywood? Although it makes an estimated US$1 billion a year from display and in-video ads on YouTube, Google sees this as sub-par given its dominance in web video. It wants to boost audiences and therefore ad revenue, by supplementing “LOLcat” videos and music clips with dedicated premium content.
Ironically, that mountain of user-generated content is providing a fertile hunting ground for fresh content that can be turned into YouTube’s new channels. Take the horror/sci-fi anthology series BlackBoxTV – short films in the vein of old Twilight Zone episodes. It already has a huge following: 335,000 people subscribe to its YouTube channel. Now the producers will be funded by Google to provide regular episodes at scheduled times each week. For young filmmakers intent on making their mark, this is potentially a more realistic route to getting their work on screen than the traditional TV industry can provide.
YouTube is showing what can be done with the online medium, but homespun shows and repackaged content provided by the Wall Street Journal and Reuters can take you only so far. Good quality content is expensive to produce, which is why even Google’s US$100 million production budget has its limits.
This is the challenge facing local company Ziln.co.nz, which aggregates video content on its own platform and has numerous channels of local content – similar to YouTube. It’s an interesting collection of videos, but doesn’t make for compulsive viewing, because Ziln takes what it can get for free rather than producing shows.
There’s plenty of angst at the moment about the future of New Zealand TV, particularly public-good programming, with the impending demise of TVNZ 7. YouTube won’t be our saviour, but the convergence of technology and TV is changing the game, opening up opportunities for providing high-quality niche content without the big-ticket spending that goes with traditional broadcast networks.
Steve Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, shortly before his death that he had “finally cracked” an integrated TV set that met his high standards of usability. The Apple TV is likely to debut in the next couple of years. And last week Google launched version two of its Google TV platform, which has so far struggled to gain traction. Google TV is available on various television sets and devices, allowing users to search for and view video and web content easily. Facebook is also looking to get in on the TV game.
The tech companies eyeing up TV are focused on bigger markets than ours, so their content aspirations aren’t necessarily a good fit for us. But they give a tantalising hint of a more flexible TV experience and some credible alternatives to existing free-to-air and pay-TV options.
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