Content providers tap Google for YouTube access

Riding on the success of the third season of the Indian Premier League on the internet, Google's YouTube is fast emerging as a premium online video destination for Indian internet subscribers.

Shailesh Rao, country head, Google India said content providers from India have approached Google to launch premium content on YouTube. Although he did not divulge any names, Rao said: "We are in talks with a few leading filmed entertainment players who are eager to distribute their content to audiences in remote international markets, where physical film distribution may not exist."

Rao is also keen to have live video telecasts of upcoming sporting events like the Twenty20 cricket tournament or CommonWealth games on YouTube. For the first time, Google is live streaming a mega cricket tournament spanning 60 matches over 45 days, for a major global sport on YouTube.

Globally, Google, in January, announced its partnership with the Sundance Film Festival to make five films from the 2010 and 2009 festivals available for rent, for its US users on YouTube. Besides these five films, a small collection of rental videos from other US partners across different industries, including health and education, will be made available too. Google is also encouraging independent filmmakers to join its rental programme (presently in Beta) as part of its "Filmmakers Wanted" campaign during the Sundance Festival.

Video-streaming site, YouTube India, attracts nearly 11 million unique users every month, a number that cannot be ignored.

Striker, an Indian film, was recently premiered on YouTube clocking over 800,000 online views. Rao elaborated on the film's success: "The response we have got for popular Bollywood movies is encouraging and we will continue to work with our partners to make both new and classic movies available on YouTube. With a global distribution platform like YouTube and success of Striker, we are confident that more content producers will be encouraged to partner with us this year."

Meanwhile, Google is ramping up the video streaming experience for its users. It has introduced an advanced auto-caption feature that uses speech-to-text algorithms found in Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer. "Viewers can even choose an option to translate the captions into any of the available 50 different languages," explained Rao.