YouTube’s Big Week
Friday, January 22, 2010
YouTube just capped off a rather impressive week full of new feature announcements that appear to be an aggressive push into a broad range of frontiers many wouldn’t have imagined a short time ago.
Firstly, Youtube signed a deal with the Indian Premier League on Tuesday to broadcast 60 live cricket matches. Youtube has done live broadcasts before starting with a Katy Perry led YouTube award show, but this is the first time that they’ve signed a deal to broadcast sports and most importantly, secured a contract to broadcast a series. According to Google (YouTube’s owner), viewers of the matches will be able to watch them live from anywhere in the world, select which camera angle they’d like to watch from, and be able to interact with other viewers across the globe via chat boards and the like.
Secondly, YouTube has entered the movie rental business. YouTube debuted its first full length movie available back in 2007, but on Wednesday, YouTube announced that they’d be promoting some of the films being shown at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City Utah… for cash. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Google was shopping around the idea to studios, but this week saw the official announcement of YouTube Rentals and the first videos are now available for $3.99 and watchable for 48 hours.
Next one. Did you ever wish that Pandora had music videos? Bam. Welcome to the YouTube Music Discovery Project. The service announced this week is just that. You punch in an artist and then hit the fitting “Disco” button and you’re off. You’re able to add and remove videos as they’re suggested, learn about the artist, and even play particular songs on demand which Pandora cannot do for you.
Wednesday also saw YouTube announce that they were beginning to roll out support for HTML5 video. True, this technical announcement might sound like the least exciting of the three, but it’s actually pretty on par. Now viewers will be able to watch videos without needing Adobe’s Flash plugin and HTML5 just got a big push as an open standard (making designers across the web giddy with excitement).
So, a few months after rolling out 1080p HD resolution and getting everyone excited, YouTube is making some new and even more significant moves. Not only are they expanding into new fields to increase revenue, they just pushed media consumption and the internet forward this week.