Google
is planning to bring its video-sharing service YouTube to television screens in
India. The technology giant is already in talks with a few DTH (direct-to-home)
providers in the country to make it a reality.
India
is a significant market for YouTube and the new step will further boost its
business in the country. Almost 5.5 per cent (55 million) of its1 billion
global monthly unique visits comes from India, and it has a library of 10,000
full-length Indian movies. Globally, about 6 billion hours of video are watched
each month on YouTube and about 100 hours of video are uploaded to the service
every minute.
Leading
DTH providers in the country are Dish TV, Tata Sky, Airtel Digital TV, Videocon
D2H, Reliance Digital TV and Sun Direct. Last month, YouTube announced in a blog post it
will enable users to watch videos offline on its mobile apps starting November
this year. What this means is that user will be able to download a video clip
on their YouTube app when they are connected to the internet, and watch it
offline later. A couple of months ago, Google had come up with a feature that
allows content creators and video producers, with a minimum of 100 subscribers
for their channels on YouTube, to live stream the channel on the video sharing
site.
YouTube was launched
in May 2005 by three former PayPal employees and saw immense traction
immediately after launch. In October 2006, it was acquired by search engine
giant Google for $1.65 billion.
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