It seems I’ve been on a video sharing site kick lately, but that’s where the news has been coming from. And YouTube is featured once again as yesterday they announced that some changes are in the works.
First, they’ve inked deals to feature content from major studios like Sony Pictures, Starz, Lionsgate, MGM, CBS and the BBC. This premium content will include thousands of TV shows and movies.
This new content is also behind a redesign of the YouTube site, where a separate area will be featured for professional content. Or in other words, all the user-generated videos will go in one pile…while the premium content goes in another. Hmmm. I wonder where all their traffic will gravitate to once this happens…to videos of dog’s skateboarding or to popular TV shows and films?
Of course all of this is due to the fact that YouTube is bleeding money and these new deals will help keep it afloat. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that user-generated videos will continue to get a free ride. In fact, YouTube stated that they haven’t counted out charging fees to use their service (although they didn’t state if these fees would be to watch premium content or simply upload videos).
“Our first priority is on the advertising side,” says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “We do expect over time to see micropayments and other forms of subscription models coming as well, but our initial focus is on advertising.”
Schmidt also indicated that this influx of premium content will first start as a trickle and build up over time. Whatever the case may be, it’s sounding an awful lot like YouTube is starting to morph into a different animal.
Dave,
Have looked at you postings a few times and find your conversational topics extremely interesting. One is that yes, video is becoming something of a must in the www world but, even more people seem to be missing out on the other areas too. (News – Web2.0 – Pictures)
I think that it will take a lot of people a fair amount of time to get the Google change implemented as far as search results are concerned, yet I hope that this will not start the spiders going off looking for real link content before considering the site position.
Look forward to reading a few more posts.
Regards
Darren Moore (UK)
I watched an AE features video on Adobe and was surprised that the new version has a feature to transcribe what is said into text and when exporting the video, it gets kind of embedded (QT player) with it and it’s searchable by search engines!