What BBC, CNN and Reuters are doing on youtube ?

Youtube might be famous for all the homemade videos created by amateurs. They are well known for the crazy videos of creative teenagers. But not anymore. As more and more mainstream broadcasters start to set their stalls here, youtube is slowly tranforming itself to be a place for more professional videos.

So why are the big media names setting their shops at youtube ?

The main attraction of youtube seems to be the large users and the active online commnunity.

The last time Wall street journal collected data on youtube was in August 2006. Youtube had around 6 million videos and 5 million registerd users at that time. That was 3 years ago. Now that numbers would be atleast three times that much.

Youtube is also one of the largest active social sites. The community interaction in youtube means that an interesting video can instantly become a viral video. You could see the viewers increasing at an exponential rate once your video gets recognized.

It is these large number of active users and the community base that attracts the mainstream broadcasters to have presence on youtube. Even if that means reducing themselves to yet another directory among the millions on youtube.

The second major reason is the technical complexities involved in hosting videos. Hosting videos are not a simple task. The storage and bandwidth requirements are enormous and maintaining large quantities of streaming videos delivered to a mass public is technologically complex. It may not be suited for the media giants who may not be experts in technology arena.

Here, Youtube provides the broadcasters with a platform that can handle the technical complexities for them. Broadcasters save on the infrastructure cost and can avoid the technical headaches involved in such massive operation.

At end of the day, it is a win win situation for both youtube and the broadcasters. At the one end, quality videos from the media giants let Youtube gain more viewers and more advertisement revenue. On the other end, the media giants can concentrate on doing what they are good at, that is, creating quality contents.

Links to News broadcasters on youtube.

BBC World wide
Reuters
CBC
CNN

I could find only a single Indian channel on youtube and that is NDTV. More on that in another topic.