Los Angeles — YouTube, Google Inc.’s most popular video sharing site has made a number of announcement recently, and back in June, it invited major publishers to join as partners, and also introduced another novel resource for citizen reporters called the YouTube Reporters’ Center. Today, it has unveiled a new feature called “News Near You” that provides YouTube users with relevant news videos based on their location.
News Near You provides YouTube users with a selection of local news bulletins based on their geographical location. Most of this related content is collected from around 200 “nontraditional” sources, including colleges and citizen journalists. The outlets are invited to post news and split the revenues with YouTube.
According to the New York Times, the service currently plays out relevant videos uploaded within the last seven days, recorded within a 100 mile radius of the user’s internet address. The feature aims to become increasingly localised as YouTube attracts further news suppliers.
In time, this shows another venture by parent company Google into other areas of media coverage, but regardless of YouTube’s local news features, they are very dissimilar to the Google News service, however, YouTube is touting it as a source of advertising revenue to broadcasters, and a means of attracting a wider, more relevant audience, and not to mention that it could instantly engineer a local newscast on the fly. It is already distributing hometown video from dozens of sources, and it wants to add thousands more.
YouTube says it is helping TV stations and its other partners by creating a new — but so far not fiscally significant — source of revenue.
Since it introduced in the Spring, almost 200 news broadcasters have eagerly signed up to feature in News Near You, and Google has invited 25,000 news outlets listed in Google News to expand into video news bulletins to earn a share of advertising revenue.
The New York Times reports that YouTube’s head of news Steve Grove claims that 5 percent of YouTube users who encounter the News Near You feature will watch at least one local video, a ratio he sees as encouraging. Grove cites “the relevancy factor” as the reason behind this interest, as YouTube users are able to watch videos from their local neighborhood “that actually matter.”
So currently, most of the YouTube videos near you come from nontraditional sources: radio stations, newspapers, colleges and, in the case of a fledgling San Francisco outfit called VidSF, three friends who despise the local TV diet of fires and homicides.
“It really levels the playing field,” said Kieran Farr, a founder of VidSF who covers the city’s culture and uploads his segments to YouTube.
News Near You draws from a variety of sources. VidSF prepares to videotape a segment with Ronn Vigh.
With current news events becoming increasingly sourced from the public domain, professional broadcasts share equal visibility with amateur videos uploaded to YouTube from iPhones and mobiles. This demand for quality filtering means that News For You is still some distance from replacing the local television news bulletin, but this is expected to change as further professional broadcasters sign up.
Brian Stelter at the New York Times says YouTube is attempting to do for local broadcast news what Google News has done for newspapers. The situation seems a little different to me.
Furthermore, with competition from real-time news broadcasters in the realms of Twitter and the like, any move to ensure that news content is delivered quickly and relevantly is sure to be a boon for broadcasters big and small — even if it does mean putting some faith in YouTube to self police.