YouTube, the largest online video streaming site, is working
hard to enhance its usage in India. As a good result of that Google has approached several leading direct-to-home
(d2h) cable operators in order to launch YouTube service to the television
screens of the country.
Mr. Francisco Varela, the Global Director of Platform Partnerships at
Google, confirmed this by revealing that YouTube TV is very much likely to be
introduced in coming months. Currently he is on his first ever official trip to
India, and he admitted that India was among the most emerging and fastest
growing markets of the YouTube.
Google wants to keep the momentum going in order to boost up the overall
usage even further. It is indeed a very wise move as TV is considered to be one
of the most powerful mediums to stay connected with the Indians. Currently the
search engine major is having some serious talks with the partners to get it
done as soon as possible.
It is worth to be mentioned here that YouTube is undoubtedly one of the
most integral parts of Google's overall revenues, which already surpassed $50
billion (nearly Rs. 3.12 lakh crore) mark in last year only.
YouTube has been gaining immense popularities since Google had acquired it in 2006. Currently web users
watched almost 6 billion hours of video each month on this streaming website.
Not only that around 100 hours of video are uploaded to the YouTube server
every minute.
While talking with a certain reporter Varela mentioned, "When we talk to direct-to-home providers or television
makers or device makers, it's so that you can watch YouTube on every screen you
have, in a fully scalable way."
However, he didn’t provide any hints whatsoever about the name of the DTH
providers his company is currently discussing with for partnership. He just
assured that they were working on a mutual tie-up and it was expected to be
completed very soon. YouTube currently has more than 55 million unique monthly
active users from India alone. It was at 15 million only at the end of 2011,
which simply means the market of this popular video platform is booming with a
very high acceleration rate.
It is quite easily understandable that the partnership with any DTH providers
will provide YouTube the direct access to the DTH subscribers of India. It can
easily get the more number of viewers from that. Google is spending well in
advertising for this platform especially in the country, and it seems the
company is thinking of taking it to another level. As per the reports of the Telecom
Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), at the end of 2012 there were a total
number of 54 million DTH subscribers in India.
Now let’s dig into the options that the YouTube has for partnerships.
Currently the largest DTH operators of the country are Tata Sky, Videocon D2H, Airtel
Digital TV, Reliance Digital TV, Sun Direct and Dish TV. Earlier YouTube had
tied-up with leading television makers such as Sony, LG and Samsung in order to make the dream of having the
video sharing site available in their smart TVs possible.
Wrap Up
According to reports, India has around 164 million YouTube users in
total as of March 2013. It is quite huge indeed, and most of them like to use
it from their smartphones or tablets only. But the connection speed is still
one of the key difficulties for YouTube in India. However, the upcoming YouTube TV will surely resolve that
problem, and this will expand its reach to all over the India.
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