YouTube renovates website
2011-12-02 10:07
San Francisco - YouTube has reprogrammed its
website to make it easier for viewers to find and watch their favorite
channels.
The facelift, unveiled on Thursday, is the
latest step in YouTube's attempt to make the Internet's most popular video site
as easy to navigate and as compelling to watch as cable TV. In the process,
YouTube owner Google Inc hopes to make money selling ads.
As part of the redesign, YouTube is replacing
its staid white background with a touch of gray.
The changes are part of the biggest
renovation that YouTube has undertaken since Google bought the site for $1.76
billion five years ago.
Although Google has been steadily adding more
frills to YouTube since that acquisition, the videos on the site often were
stitched in a crazy quilt that often required visitors to do a lot of searching
to find what they wanted.
Google also has been sprucing up other
products in recent months, including its Gmail service and news section.
YouTube's website has been reorganised to
display three main vertical columns instead of scattering clips in horizontal
rows.
The left of the page is devoted to a column
that can be customised to feature a viewer's favourite channels and monitor the
videos being posted by their friends on social networks, including Facebook - a
rival to Google's own Plus service.
The effort to highlight channels comes a few
weeks after YouTube agreed to invest $100 million in original programming from
about 100 celebrities, media companies and video entrepreneurs. Most of these
channels will debut next year. YouTube hopes additional advertising will enable
it to reap a profit from the investment.
The middle of YouTube's new home page is
where videos can be played. The selection will change as viewers click on a
different channel included in their lists in the left column. The far right
column will recommend other videos, based on what kind of clips that viewers
have watched in the past.
Bringing more professionally-produced content
and more organisation to YouTube has become more important since last year's
introduction of Google TV - an attempt to seamlessly blend conventional
television programming with Web surfing. YouTube's more streamlined look might
make the site more attractive to watch on large-screen TVs using Google's
product or other connections to the Internet.
Google TV has struggled so far, partly
because major Hollywood networks such as News Corp.'s Fox and The Walt Disney
Co.'s ABC have blocked their content from the platform because they think it
will undercut their advertising revenue and fees from pay-TV distributors such
as Comcast Corp and DirecTV.
- AP
