CABLE CONGRESS 2011 – LUCERNE. YouTube’s head of partnerships, Donagh O’Malley, set out to tell the cable industry it had nothing to fear from its on demand TV partnerships or from a planned subscription-based service.
O’Malley said that its agreement with Channel 4, which places the UK broadcaster’s content on the Google-owned service at the same time as 4oD, had not harmed its own service. A similar deal was struck with Channel 5.
YouTube began running pre-roll ads 12 months ago. Partners can decide whether or not they want to carry ads and in which territories.
Underlining the potential threat to other platforms, O’Malley said that whereas average user sessions on YouTube normally lasted from five to ten minutes, long-form viewers took this up to two hours.
YouTube recently concluded a licensing deal with Virgin Media for the UK cableco to include content as part of the TiVo service. Other operators are known to be interested in a similar arrangement.
O’Malley denied that Google TV would lead to ‘cord cutting’ from disenfranchised cable customers. “Google TV is not a content service, if you decide to cancel your pay-TV sub and go for Google TV, frankly you’ll be disappointed,” he said.
