Media Guardian is reporting that ‘ITN is to launch a channel on YouTube to deliver a range of entertainment, sport and film programmes’: well, it didn’t take too much detective work to find the page, at youtube.com/itn.
Immediate thought: what does the N in ITN stand for these days? There’s no actual ‘news’.
Instead, the Guardian pieces tells us, ‘an average of five entertainment clips – the same as are provided by ITN On to customers such as MSN, Yahoo!, Virgin Mobile and 3 – will be posted on YouTube each day.’ There’s a weekly Bollywood Insider bulletin, and a daily (?) ‘EPL News’ football roundup…. clearly not aimed at a UK audience, for whom the name EPL is a joke. And anyway, since ITN doesn’t have the rights, the one thing you won’t actually see in the bulletin is any actual English Premier League football. Why are they even bothering?
(Incidentally: if you want proper EPL action, I heartily recommend the Virgin website – lengthy highlights packages in very good video quality, even blown up full-screen.)
The only really interesting bit is that ITN will be ‘one of the first UK media companies to exploit YouTube’s new in-video ad format’. I haven’t spotted any usage of it in the wild yet… but if you haven’t yet seen the adverts-on-video method, there’s an example on the Google blog.