With 800 million unique monthly users and 48 hours of video uploaded every minute, YouTube is a powerful medium for delivering news, entertainment, and content from all across the world. For most people, YouTube is simply the go-to site for viewing online content, from comical cat videos to intergalactic exploration. Yet there’s one place where YouTube has yet to leave its mark, and that’s on the TV screen sitting in your house. In an interesting article by Mashable, YouTube’s Director of Product Management reveals how YouTube is trying “to be all things video, and that means getting video into all places.” As natural as it sounds for YouTube to migrate onto bigger screens, it’s not quite that simple…

Quality Control

One reason why YouTube has done so well is because of the ease at which users can create and share videos at anytime and from any device. From YouTube’s perspective, there’s no judgement or bias about the videos being uploaded – any video with any image or audio quality can be uploaded to the site. While this lack of discrimination is precisely the reason why YouTube is able to reach such a magnitude of uploaded videos, it results in inconsistent video quality and experience. To create the optimal TV experience, videos need to be high quality with quick loading times – pixelated videos simply won’t cut it in today’s HD world. One of the biggest challenges for getting YouTube on TV screens will be bridging the gap between accommodating the democratized approach to video uploads and the lower quality videos that subsequently arise.

Sliced Bread Solutions

You know the spinner that appears on your screen whenever a YouTube video is loading? Andy Berkheimer, YouTube’s Head of Engineering, states that “the goal is to get rid of the spinner.” He explains that the spinner is the main predictor of whether users abandon videos and move on to something else. As such, speeding up the loading process is an important goal not only for retention purposes, but also for optimizing viewing experiences for TV.

Ultimately, YouTube wants to change user behaviour such that people tune into the site during primetime TV hours rather than just using it for short clips throughout your day. How close are they to reaching this goal? While YouTube reports a spike in viewers every evening across America, it’s likely that this is due to second-screen TV watching rather than people solely watching YouTube videos. While big TV brands such as LG, Panasonic, and Sony have launched YouTube’s “send to TV” feature on their newest devices, YouTube still has a long way to go before replacing traditional TV channels.

Do you think YouTube can dominate primetime TV? Let us know in the comments!

About the Author

After graduating from the HBA program at the Richard Ivey School of Business, Aaliyah launched her career as Marketing Coordinator at Uberflip! Prior to her HBA, Aaliyah also completed a Bachelor in English at Western University.

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