YouTube is looking to take its quality up a notch by deepening its relationships with Hollywood.
According to New York, the Google-owned video hub, famous for its massive library of low-quality user-generated clips, is reaching out to the TV and movies worlds for original Web series ideas.
Specifically, Google is offering celebrity talent a chance to program their own YouTube channels in exchange for ownership of any content that gets produced, according to New York. The site cited Bravo’s Tim Gunn as an example of the type of stars Google is going after. The idea, driven by recently installed YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar, is to build up Google’s premium content well to attract brand advertisers.
That’s been a YouTube goal for several years since it became clear that top advertisers were not going to embrace surfing-cat videos—and were instead increasingly gravitating to Hulu’s premium video content.
But even as YouTube has added far more professional content, it has maintained a reputation for B-list fare: showcasing movies like Jackie Chan’s Wheels on Meals and old TV shows like The Greatest American Hero.
