Google

Google Unveils ‘Personalized Channels’ to Bridge TV Attention Gap

• By John C Abell  
• December 1, 2010  |  
• 8:30 pm  |  
• Categories: Video

Some 35 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube every minute, but the numbers Google are most interested in are “5″ and “15.”

The former is the number of hours the average person watches TV every day. The latter is the number of minutes the average person stays on YouTube per session — yes, I thought that was low too.

So Google is pressing its advantage — a seemingly limitless supply of content on what would seem to be every topic imaginable, and a pretty good idea already of what you like to watch — in a bid to bridge that attention gap.

The search giant is calling its new feature “Personalized Channels” and rolling it out as part of YouTube’s “Leanback” service, a quasi-TV experience complete with pre-curated channels like “comedy” and “gaming,” and a “remote control” via Android smart phones.

With the personalization, you will be able to create a never-ending video stream based on keywords that you provide, and on your viewing history. Your channels get better over time, the company promises.

Users of Pandora and similar cloud-based music services will be familiar with the concept: You name an artist and you get a “station” playing that act’s tracks as well as those which the algorithm deems is in a similar genre. And, like streaming audio stations, you can vote up and down specific video streams to try to exclude types of content from bubbling up downstream.

The music metaphor isn’t lost on Google. A spokesman brought it up spontaneously in a briefing with Wired.com in advance of the announcement.

But there are big differences. It’s easy to create a station based on, say, Rick Astley. But there are lots of possible ways to describe things that aren’t household words. “On YouTube it is hard to know what to call ‘keyboard cat’ videos,” said Shiva Rajaraman, senior product manager. “So the challenge was, ‘How do we create a vocabulary?’”

This is where user history comes in handy as a starting point.

Creating online video channels around behavior seems way overdue — after all, TiVo tagged you as gay nearly a decade ago. It’s been long possible on YouTube to subscribe to individual feeds, and to do ad hoc searches which play one clip and suggest others when that one ends. “Personalized Channels” leverages YouTube as a vast library rather than as a subscription service, introducing a more refined means of discovery that could prove quite sticky.

The irony is that YouTube is battling to become more like TV even as Google TV tries to make television more like the internet. The main paradigm of television is to sit back and do nothing.

So this new effort to limit interaction, and the need for limiting it, ironically emphasize YouTube not as a mere repository, visited for a specific reason and for a short period of time, but as a genuine lean-back experience — rivaling the boob tube for your attention, loyalty and disposable, time-wasting minutes.

Wait — that’s a good thing?

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