Today’s Wall Street journal reports that YouTube is going to launch about 20 TV channels with low-cost professionally generated content – in line with their recent acquisition of Next New Networks. This move to cohesive channels would help their YouTube Leanback strategy – which has been surprisingly quiet since it was launched with Google TV last fall. Strangely, this strategy has already shown some success in China – with key video sites YouKu and Todou sponsoring some content creation.
In our upcoming Over the Top report, we discuss the multiple ways user’s ability to identify and locate video – including traditional EPGs, recommendations, search and social. We believe YouTube’s historical methods of finding content have been too confusing – especially for the TV screen – with the blending of search, recommdations, queues, subscriptions, channels and the like. Hopefully YouTube’s new initiate will help simplify the offering and make it transfer to the TV – from the experience as well as from the content perspective.
