YouTube going TV?

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24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute, and more than 46 years worth of YouTube videos are watched daily via Facebook alone...

YouTube is becoming more aggressive in pitching itself to advertisers and content owners as an alternative to television, arguing that it can replace TV deals for content owners seeking overseas audiences.

Last October, on the third anniversary of Google’s $1.65bn acquisition, YouTube announced that it had passed 1 billion views a day – although TechCrunch had reported in June that the figure had already passed 1.2 billion.

YouTube will on Monday reveal that it serves up more than 2bn videos a day as it tries to persuade the world’s content providers that it can offer “TV-size audiences” to the very companies that had once lined up to denounce or even sue the video-sharing site.

With more than a thousand professional content partners, “it’s going to start to look like the cable TV networks of the 70s, 80s and 90s”.

“YouTube is the only place you can put your content on the web and reach a TV-size audience in every country,” he said, adding that it could “prime the market for tomorrow’s TV deals” in countries where content such as Indian cricket would otherwise never be shown.

YouTube is also studying how to use data on customers’ viewing habits and what their friends are watching to serve up video suggestions without users having to search. The group is also looking at streaming 3D content such as sporting events live, and expanding its use of automated captioning and translation tools to reach users in 50 different languages.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/21d53da4-6112 ... ab49a.html

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