YouTube goal: Be more than cat clip central

LOS ANGELES — On a blustery spring day five years ago, Yakov Lapitzy pointed a video camera at his friend Jawed Karim standing in front of two elephants at the San Diego Zoo and hit the record button.

The resulting 19-second clip, titled “Me at the zoo,” was not a cinematic masterpiece. But as the first video uploaded to YouTube, it played a pivotal role in altering how people consumed media and helped usher in a golden era of the 60-second video.

“Prior to YouTube, there was no way people would watch anything that was 30 or 60 seconds,” said Paul Levinson, a professor of media and communication studies at Fordham University and author of the book “New New Media.” “On TV, the shortest show was 30 minutes.”

Now, the king of Internet video is embarking on a mission to become nothing less than the world’s TV.

The average YouTube viewer sticks around for about 15 minutes a day, while TV ensnares people for five hours daily. So the San Bruno, Calif., company is experimenting with ways to keep people on its site longer.

To close the gap with television, YouTube is adding full-length movies, two-hour concerts and live sporting events. It’s putting an emphasis on more polished videos from independent movie producers, major record labels and even Hollywood studios with whom YouTube has had a prickly relationship.

“The day is coming when people won’t think of online video as being separate from TV,” said Shishir Mehrotra, who runs YouTube’s advertising programs as director of product management. “The lines are blurring in both directions.”

That was not the idea in 2005 when YouTube founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Karim stitched the company together in an office above a pizzeria in San Mateo, Calif. The goal was to create a site that would make it easy for average people to share their homemade videos.

By July 2006, the company announced that 65,000 videos a day were being uploaded to its site. In October 2006, Google agreed to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, even though there was nary a profit in sight.

YouTube also caught the eye of Viacom Inc., which sued YouTube and its new corporate parent in March 2007 for $1 billion, alleging that YouTube had violated its copyrights when users uploaded pirated videos of Viacom’s TV shows, including episodes of “South Park.” Google claimed that Viacom employees had uploaded many of those clips to market their shows to millions of YouTube users. That case continues to wend its way through federal courts.

Part of YouTube’s power is that it has become the first place many Web surfers turn to find video, making it the second most popular search engine after parent Google. YouTube now streams 2 billion video views a day, more than the number of videos served up by three major broadcasters combined.

Whether YouTube has parlayed those eyeballs into profit is another matter. Google has declined to break out YouTube’s financial performance from its overall earnings and has not said whether its subsidiary is profitable.

To improve its margins, YouTube is cultivating more professionally produced videos, which tend to keep people around longer than homemade cat videos.

A prime example is “Striker,” a Bollywood thriller that debuted on YouTube in January on the same day it was released in theaters. Its producers had the film blocked in India and Pakistan, made it available for rent for $3.99 on YouTube in the U.S., and let the rest of the world watch it for free, supported by advertising. YouTube served up more than 954,300 views of the movie but declined to say how many were paid rentals.

« Entertainment

Share