By BRIAN STELTER and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
YouTube, making an expensive bet on original content, is planning to create dozens of channels featuring comedians, sports stars, musicians and other entertainers.
The channels will receive programming from a long list of media companies, including big television production companies like FremantleMedia as well as small start-ups like Maker Studios, YouTube said.
“Today, the Web is bringing us entertainment from an even wider range of talented producers, and many of the defining channels of the next generation are being born, and watched, on YouTube,” Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s global head of content partnerships, wrote in a blog post.
Parts of the plan have been well known in Hollywood for months. YouTube, a unit of Google, has made no secret of the fact that it wants to create an alternative to cable television on the Internet. It offered cash advances to prospective producers that totaled more than $100 million, according to people with knowledge of the plan who were not authorized to speak publicly.
The investments in the channels reflect Google’s belief that the Internet is the third phase of the television business, after network TV (with a few channels) and cable TV (with hundreds). “We’re not going from three to 300 channels but to millions of channels,” Mario Quieroz, head of Google TV, said in a recent interview. “The Web is essentially infinite content.”
Mr. Quieroz said that YouTube is not trying to compete with cable. “Like when the cable channels came to TV, we don’t believe the Web is going to replace linear TV,” he said. “This is designed to be complementary to cable TV.”
But the six-year-old site has gradually set itself up as a hub for professionally produced, made-for-the-Web material, in addition to the torrent of amateur video that is posted daily. YouTube even bought camera equipment and editing software for some of its top producers. Those purchases, made in the form of grants, were described as a way to improve the quantity of TV-quality content on the site.
The forthcoming channels will increase the number of shows that viewers can watch on big-screen TV sets as well as laptops and tablets. Some of the channels will come online in November, according to people involved in the productions, but many others will not be ready until 2012.
The channels, like other professional content on YouTube, will be free for viewers and supported by advertisers. Rather than signing the top TV studios, which have so far been reluctant to offer Google free Web content, YouTube has recruited up-and-coming digital studios like Electus and Vice, as well as established brands like the Wall Street Journal, Thomson Reuters and WWE, the wrestling producer.
Production companies associated with celebrities like Madonna, Rainn Wilson, and Shaquille O’Neal are also on YouTube’s list of participants, as are online video outlets like Demand Media and the TED Conferences.
“We’re looking for the next generation of MTVs, HBOs, just like cable,” added Rishi Chandra, the director of product management for Google TV.
Earlier on Friday, Google announced a new version of Google TV, including a new version of YouTube that looked more like TV. Google also added easier search tools so people searching for cooking shows or sports events could see shows available on cable, YouTube or Web apps like those from Amazon.com, Netflix and HBO.
