YouTube boss on channelizing and game-fying YouTube experience with six dimensions of entertainment

9to5 Staff | Feb 1 2012 - 1:37 pm PT

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YouTube boss Salar Kamangar sat down yesterday with AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski at the “D: Dive Into Media” conference to talk content, the future of video entertainment and the big picture. He stressed the apps cable companies are building for Google TV let them control the entire experience, from the interface to delivery methods to monetizing mechanism.

As for YouTube, a global video delivery platform used by over 800 million people, it has the eyeballs and the audience. What it lacks is the minutes, as compared to traditional broadcast. The executive confirmed plans to “channelize” YouTube with more interactive and niche content than available on any other platform.

The website is already moving from individual kitten clips to groups of videos (channels), he said. Moreover, in the near future, YouTube wants to become a platform to enable “game-fying” of video content with six dimensions of entertainment…

The first wave was broadcast network, the second wave was cable networks, and the third wave is on-demand streamed over the Internet, Kamangar noted. What about the other three?

Imagine that you’re watching a football game in three dimensions. you should be able to pick the helmet cam and get the view you wanna follow from any player in the three-dimensional space. Now, you should also be able to see that game with other people that you already know and maybe there’s even representations of them in the stadium that you’re looking at. The final dimension, I think, is most exciting, which is the one where you alter the outcome of the game. You might be able to have a vote, have a say, in what play the quarterback calls next.

The sheer size of today’s audiences and the massive scale of Internet, he said, lets one build niche viewership in ways that cable networks cannot match. In addition, a one-way broadcast system, such as the cable network, cannot provide interactive feedback as opposed to web-based delivery methods. Google as of recently provides premium and free of charge entertainment content produced by professional studios and funded with hundreds of millions of dollars.