Rumor: Google spending $150M to launch 25+ professional YouTube channels

This is a REAL potential game changer and I've been patiently waiting to see how long it would take before a major internet video streaming company made this move.

The underlying reason for Netflix's current woes is because CONTENT producers are squeezing it to them and will be increasing their prices significantly in the next year. The reason Hulu wasn't acquired even though many companies considered it, was because the CONTENT producers (who also happen to currently own Hulu) planned on increasing their prices to anyone who was dumb enough to buy Hulu without long term costs locked in contractually.

With this move, Google is moving to consolidate distribution as well as content production into Youtube. The significance of this can't be underestimated. If YouTube can produce a hit show, there's no middle man to step in and charge them arbitrary licensing fees to host the show.

I don't see any reason why youtube couldn't produce a show like MythBusters or the Jersey Shore. And in a few years, maybe even a show like Breaking Bad.

Once this ball get's rolling traditional cable will be in for a rough ride.

It's up to traditional cable companies to embrace this disruptive technology we like to call "the internet" and find a way to build a better business model using it. This would inevitably undercut their own "traditional" models for content delivery, but as more and more people cut the chord because more options are available, their refusal to innovate simply means that other players are going to come in and take the share they could/should have had.

One of the differences between tv and Internet is that tv channels have an oligopoly on your attention. There's a small limited number of channels competing for attention across all tv viewers. YouTube has to compete not only against millions of Other things on the net bit also millions of other videos on YouTube itself. It'll be interesting to see if the tv model of taking large million dollar bets on unproven shows works here.

As a fan of Thisweekin I would like to see how they respond to this move.

Indeed! Especially now since there aren't any practical limits on youtube video size, duration, or quality.

There is already a lot of pretty high quality original content on youtube. Some of that content is more popular than some cable content. There are youtube channels which have weekly updates and see millions of viewers on every episode. They are under the traditional media radar though since they don't have a promotional budget and they don't appear in a program lineup anywhere.

This trend can only accelerate from here. Producing a "show" or a "movie" requires a teeny, tiny amount of effort and resources these days, and can be done without spending more than 4 figures on equipment and whatnot.

We are nearing an inflection point in this process, soon there will be a critical mass of shows and viewers such that word-of-mouth recommendations start exploding viewership and more importantly that it begins to become cemented in the zeitgeist that making an "internet tv show" is a perfectly acceptable thing to do, regardless of how talented you are, and more so is a quite feasible thing to do. That will lead to a spiraling increase in both content and viewership which will likely catch a lot of the traditional media folks off guard. I don't think they realize that there is a bubbling cauldron out there which is poised to spew forth the equivalent of hundreds of channels of content. Content that people will watch. And talk about. And value at the same level as traditional TV content.