Idiot Box, intelligent Tube

YouTube has now gone desi, literally. On June 7, the video-sharing website launched YouTube Box Office, an Indian film channel that will feature a new film every month for everyone to view, and opened the month's account with Band Baaja Baaraat.u00a0Sunday MiDDAY spoke to Gautam Anand, Director, Content-Partnerships for YouTube Japan-Asia Pacific on the purpose of the channel and its future plans.

What was the impetus behind setting up YouTube Box Office?u00a0
In India, sports and entertainment is a big focus area. When we showed Dabangg on YouTube, over 1.3 million users viewed it. With over 48 hours of content being uploaded on YouTube every minute, we thought there was scope for a website that focuses on Bollywood content, which is why we launched YouTube Box Office.

Given that YouTube is a free video-sharing site, are you monetising the site with this venture?
Ours is an ad-supported model. We run ads only against our partner content and not user-generated content. Advertisers can either pay when that ad is shown, or when a user clicks the ad. For this channel, we have Intel as a presenting sponsor and we will have a revenue-sharing model with our premium content partners, Rajshri and Yash Raj Films.

Will you get independent filmmakers and small production houses on board too?
Our partners see great value in distributing their content on YouTube as it provides them great reach and they have the flexibility to choose how they want to use our platform. At present, the channel's catalogue of movies includes over 1,500 titles including English, Hindi, Marathi, Telegu, Tamil and more. This is an ongoing effort for us and we will continue to build on regional and premium movie offering. We already have over 10,000 partners which range from premium content producers to independent filmmakers and small production houses.

One reason online video services hasn't picked up in the country yet, is because of poor Internet speeds. Was this a concern?
We understand the infrastructure challenges in India and to that end we have optimised our platform to showcase content even on low-bandwidth. YouTube Box Office movies are available from 240 pixels to 1080 HD quality experience, so users can choose the resolution based on their connections. And with 3G already launched in Indiau00a0-- we hope to see more data consumption on mobile phones.

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