YouTube announcement - It's going to become more television-like!

In an article by Todd Spangler in the hard-copy edition of Multichannel News, I read that YouTube is "going professional" with an agreement with various entities to produce professional looking content for its 96 new video channels. 

This is very interesting, for a pioneering site to be developing itself like this, to finance and provide professionally produced content for its growing audience; it sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?  Among the partners YouTube has teamed up with are Madonna, Shaquille O'Neal, Ashton Kutcher, Deepak Chopra, The Onion, Jay-Z, Hearst Magazines, Varsity Pictures and The Wall Street Journal. This is quite the eclectic collection, in my opinion.  But, if you're trying to fill up 96 "channels" you need content providers, so maybe this is a great opportunity to see what these providers can deliver.

Spangler explains in his article that one reason to launch on the Internet is the cost.  "It's extremely expensive to create and launch a linear TV network....” And the position Google (parent of YouTube) is taking with this endeavor is that of "growing the universe of video entertainment and news options available to consumers."  And, according to Barclays Capital analyst, Anthony DiClemente, “This is Google’s first step toward providing a more robust platform for professionally produced independent content, and… positions Google to act as a distributor in a bid toward capturing incremental ad dollars that are traditionally directed toward TV.” (Spangler, 2011)

This is all very interesting, as it sounds very much like Google is trying to turn YouTube into a traditional distributor, with content produced with that professional look so many enjoy on traditional TV, and with the advertising so many almost loathe on traditional TV, and it sounds a lot like YouTube is trying to become more like traditional TV with it’s many production companies creating content for the masses and the big ad dollars.  So, YouTube is becoming the newest provider for television service.  Very interesting – it all seems so “traditional” – but with a twist, of course.  Funny, that old adage of “what’s old is new again” seems to ring true here, even with the twist that these will be independent production and not the traditional content producers we’re accustomed to.  And it sounds like this is all being orchestrated in this way to garner those all important ad dollars.  It will definitely be interesting to see how this new venture bodes for Google’s YouTube.  It seems like YouTube is working on growing to become so very much like the traditional TV that web enterprises like YouTube were originally trying to break.  And the traditional TV networks are becoming more and more like the TV of the future I’ve read about in other courses through the years, with the end of linear networks as we now know them, evolving into the video-on-demand networks, where each viewer becomes the program scheduling department.  It appears as if these two approaches by these different “camps”, if you will, are evolving into each other almost.  Truly fascinating developments in this realm of the glowing box, or screen.  I will be very interested in following the success of these changes coming to YouTube; who knows, maybe one day soon I’ll be able to sit down and turn on my TV to channel 1006 and watch the YouTube network’s new Fall lineup featuring the new game show “What’s My Line?” – you never know.