Film Futurist

On Friday afternoon, YouTube quietly announced its new lineup of “original content” channels – meaning not the kind of channel you create for your skateboarding videos, but the kind of channel YouTube thinks will be able to compete with television. We all knew YouTube was headed into the pro-content biz, but until now the strategy has been a mystery.

From my vantage point, it seemed to this point that the weird ways of “the biz” eluded the tech giant – an oddity for a behemoth used to conquering all things. The question on everyone’s mind was: will Google acquire an entertainment company? A studio? Well, they’re obviously not that stupid…we all know the profit models for entertainment are sketchy at best, no matter the product. So it was with great interest that I observed the acquisition of not a company, but an individual – Netflix veteran Robert Kyncl, whose job as VP of Content Partnerships would solder that soft link between the two worlds of tech and entertainment. As the blog AllThingsD noted back in September, Google “needs someone who can talk to Hollywood and big media companies; many of the folks who have done that work for it in the past have moved on, including Jordan Hoffner (IAC), Dave Eun (AOL) and Tim Armstrong (AOL, too)” Well, they were right, in a way…but talking is only half the battle.  Content is the other half, and well, even these industrious folks mentioned in the article haven’t exactly emerged as the kings of content.

On the YouTube blog, Kyncl posted a blurb about the new program (which includes lots of celeb-owned or driven content proferred by Madonna, Jay-Z, Amy Poehler and more) pitching the program as:

channels created by well-known personalities and content producers from the TV, film, music, news, and sports fields, as well as some of the most innovative up-and-coming media companies in the world and some of YouTube’s own existing partners. These channels will have something for everyone, whether you’re a mom, a comedy fan, a sports nut, a music lover or a pop-culture maven.

YouTube thus far has been pretty much “something for everyone”. I gather then, that this is just a higher quality version of what we previously knew to be YT. If, as the Wrap says the program is “expected to generate about 25 hours of new programming a day on YouTube”, I wonder how that will differ from the hundreds of hours of unwatched cable programming I zip by every day on the remote control. I’m not sure how that ultimately challenges the cable TV experience, except that it’s free.

So this may just be an exercise in how much ad revenue so called premium content can command online. But of course I keep wishing that Google– which has the resources to innovate–would actually take on the challenge not only as a means to find the frontier, but also to speak to the growing shifts in our own consumption interests, which I contend here, may not be as passive as Hollywood wishes it would be, and as easy to solve with a pocketful of celebrities.