Google TV with YouTube TV Channels

[Temis the Vorta]

Big news from Google and their minion YouTube today:

Google taking another shot at Google TV.

Google Inc is making another push to bring its Web savvy to television sets, hoping to tap into a vast new market despite consumers' lukewarm reaction to one of its initial offerings.

The Internet search engine unveiled a revamped version of its Google TV service and announced plans to create about one hundred online "channels" of original video programing for its YouTube website, in separate announcements on Friday.

The YouTube channels will feature videos created though partnerships with various media organizations, and involving celebrities including rapper Jay-Z, Madonna and skateboarder Tony Hawk. The partnerships involve more than $100 million in upfront payments by Google to the various partners, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A list of the channels.

Well, The Onion is in there, but other than that, uh...?

Where's the sci fi channel? I'd watch a sci fi channel of original content and mashed-up parodies.

Here's one thing that's missing: Netflix needs to have a YouTube channel of user reviews of movies and TV shows it rents. The highest rated can be linked to the listings for those movies and TV shows in Netflix itself. Reviewers would have to be pretty memorable to percolate to the top, like that fat guy who likes to trash the Star Wars PT. I'm sure there are a few dozen folks in the world who could provide that degree of entertainment value. It might be so entertaining that people will stop cancelling their accounts. Worth a try.

But...www.youtube.com/netflix doesn't even exist. I'm amazed how many times I can type in www.youtube.com/[famous brand name that I assume has a marketing department to handle these things] and it doesn't exist!

 

[Jetfire]

SF/F is expensive to produce...it would take a commitment they probably aren't willing to do at this stage.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

But it's freaking YouTube!!! It doesn't have to look like the second coming of Pandora.

This thing has gotten 86 million views on YouTube. The bar is not set high for special effects.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN5PoW7_kdA[/yt]

Just do something that looks twice as good and you'll get half the numbers, isn't that how it works? 43 million viewers is a good deal more than even the Superbowl gets.

 

[Jetfire]

I dunno...that crap is stupid. A serious SF/F would take more than talking fruit...but how serious is the YT audience?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

There is no useful purpose served by Youtube user reviews of any movie or TV show ever.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I dunno...that crap is stupid. A serious SF/F would take more than talking fruit...but how serious is the YT audience?

Well the real problem with Annoying Orange is not the audience, but that it represents the kind of video that advertisers don't want to be associated with, because it is so aggressively stupid. YouTube can't survive if it's got no way to make money, so they need to make the advertisers happy.

The problem with this approach is that the indiscriminate nature of YouTube, with its total lack of filtering and tsunami of crap that people can sort through to find stuff they'd never find elsewhere, is also the genius part of it. By setting up professional channels with content that appeals to advertisers, YouTube is simply re-creating the same problem that is killing TV: what appeals to advertisers simply can't compete with the ultra-niche "programming" provided by YouTube.

It's funny, but YouTube and TrekBBS have the same problem: it's hard to make a living on the internet from just advertising. Both need to find creative ways of augmenting their revenues, but I think YouTube is on the wrong track here.

There is no useful purpose served by Youtube user reviews of any movie or TV show ever.

There's no useful purpose served by any of your posts, yet you continue to yammer on.