Google has announced that they are bringing original programming to France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Google invested $100 million in the first set of 100 original channels as of last October. They have seen a lot of success because the top 25 channels average over one million views per week.
On Wednesday night, YouTube hosted a huge event to inform advertisers that they are spending $100 million for their new “channels” as a way of bringing in premium content. Jay-Z, FloRida, Jennifer Beals, the Neon Trees, and Eric Schmidt were in attendance at the event. YouTube also announced that they will be spending $200 million on premium footage across Google’s Content Network to push the channels.
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Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) subsidiary YouTube and The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) is spending $10-$15 million to create an original video series according to The New York Times. The video shorts will be produced by Disney and it will be distributed on a co-branded channel on Disney.com and YouTube. Disney will benefit from getting web traffic from YouTube. The original video content will benefit YouTube because they are competing against websites that specialize in premium video content. YouTube depends heavily on user-generated content for its popularity.
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Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is in talks to buy the digital rights to Miramax’s movies. Disney is getting ready to sell the Miramax studio to Filmyard Holdings. If Google is successful in their bid, then they would get access to movies such as “No Country for Old Men” and “Pulp Fiction” to be placed on YouTube and Google TV. Google is making this deal in order to further compete with Netflix. Google had hired former Netflix exec Robert Kyncl this past September as VP of content partnerships to work on Hollywood deals like this. [AllThingsD]
