YouTube’s Quest to Suggest More

December 31, 2009

By MIGUEL HELFT
SAN BRUNO, Calif. — YouTube, the video site owned by Google, is about 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor. But Hunter Walk still thinks of it as an underdog.

For Mr. Walk, director of product management at YouTube, the competition is not other Web sites: it’s TV.

“Our average user spends 15 minutes a day on the site,” he said. “They spend about five hours in front of the television. People say, ‘YouTube is so big,’ but I really see that we have a ways to go.”

To that end, Mr. Walk leads a team of about a dozen engineers, designers and project managers who are fine-tuning YouTube to give its users what they want, even when the users aren’t quite sure what that is. The goal is to get them to spend a few more minutes on the site every day.

This is easier said than done. YouTube will not disclose the size of its video library, but the company has said that about 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. That is the equivalent of more than 100,000 full-length movies uploaded every week. With hundreds of millions of clips to choose from, the challenge that Mr. Walk’s team faces is to figure out how to select the 5 or 10 or 20 that a user might enjoy most.

The payoff could be large. Google executives have said YouTube is still losing money but is on a path to profitability. Getting users to spend more time on the site would help it get there faster by selling more advertising. It could also go a long way to extend its dominance, shoring up its position against sites like Hulu, which are attracting a growing number of users with full-length movies and television shows.

And it could also help YouTube keep up with other competitors, including video search engines like Truveo and Blinkx, or sites like Clicker.com, which specializes in recommending professionally created videos online.

After Blinkx added better analysis of the visual content of videos to its engine early this year, for example, the average number of clips watched by users jumped to nearly five, from 2.5, said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and chief executive of Blinkx.

For YouTube, part of the challenge is in handling people’s searches. In November, Americans typed some 3.8 billion search queries on YouTube, more than on any search engine other than Google, according to comScore, a market researcher. While Google queries tend to be quite specific, users often come to YouTube with requests as vague as “funny videos.”

But perhaps more important, YouTube must finesse what technicians call discovery. That’s the art of suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on what they have watched before, or on what others with similar tastes have enjoyed. The effort requires mastering data-mining techniques similar to those used by the likes of Netflix and Amazon to make movie or book recommendations.

“I don’t think the YouTube problem is different from the Netflix problem or the Amazon problem,” said Christopher T. Volinsky, executive director of statistics research at AT&T Labs Research. Mr. Volinsky recently helped lead a team that won a $1 million prize established by Netflix to improve that site’s recommendation engine by 10 percent.

That it took his team of top computer scientists three years to make a modest improvement to Netflix, which has some 70,000 titles, illustrates the complexity of the task, Mr. Volinsky said.

YouTube’s work in these areas is largely hidden from users and involves dozens of tweaks, small and large, that Mr. Walk’s team makes every month. Recently, for instance, the group began tackling what it calls topic exhaustion. No matter how much users may like to watch, say, Shaquille O’Neal highlights, they will inevitably reach a point when they will have had enough.

So while YouTube used to suggest more of the same topic to users who watched a particular video, it has gently begun to nudge them toward related topics. The Shaquille O’Neal video may prompt suggestions for Kobe Bryant highlights, N.B.A. clips or even topics further afield, like sports stars who appear in films.

“If we guess wrong, you could leave us sooner,” said Jamie Davidson, a 25-year-old associate product manager on Mr. Walk’s team. “But if we guess correctly, we may get you to watch another 10 videos. This is very hard.”

The techniques involve creating vast graphs, which Mr. Davidson calls conceptual maps, of related concepts like Shaquille O’Neal, the N.B.A. and Kobe Bryant, on which the proximity of two nodes indicates the closeness of two topics. The YouTube recommendation engine uses these maps to find new subject areas that might interest a user.

Over time, YouTube says it plans to rely more heavily on personalization and ties between users to refine recommendations.

Mr. Walk’s team meets weekly to discuss tweaks to YouTube’s software. During a recent meeting, a small group of engineers and user interface designers were brainstorming what might be the next big step in the site’s evolution: pages that would immediately begin playing a stream of clips tailored for a user, instead of offering lists of suggested videos. The idea is to push more videos at users in the hope of allowing them to abandon the keyboard and increasingly experience YouTube from the couch.

“On YouTube, every 45 seconds, you are stuck at a decision point,” Mr. Davidson said. “Any time there is a decision point, people may leave. We don’t want to take out the interactivity, but the default user experience should be a lot easier.”

Palash Nandy, an engineer on the team, suggests a couple of ideas. How about putting an “I’m feeling bored” button next to the search box, echoing Google’s famous “I’m feeling lucky” button? Or why not give users a slider to select the amount of time they want to be entertained, and let YouTube’s software assemble a playlist accordingly?

None of this is likely to appear on the YouTube home page soon. But the team is already working on new ways to let users collectively create lists of videos that share a topic, like cats playing keyboards (youtube.com/bestofkeyboardcat). The ideas may show up first in the TestTube, YouTube’s site for experimental features.

Gauging YouTube’s success so far is difficult. YouTube will not release detailed traffic statistics. But it says improvements in its search and discovery software have helped increase the average time that users spend on the site by 50 percent in the last year.

Data from comScore appears to back that up. The average YouTube user watched 83 clips in October, compared with 53 a year earlier, though it is difficult to know how much of that growth was the result of improvements in YouTube’s algorithms.

Either way, Mr. Walk’s team plans to speed up the pace of innovation to help YouTube users search less and watch more.

“We are the second-largest search engine, and yet search is not even the right paradigm for discovering video,” Mr. Davidson said. “We are trying to move beyond it.”

The Electric Company, Sesame Workshop

The second season of Sesame Workshop's series The Electric Company (12x30) is set to premiere January 25, 2010 on PBS Kids Go (check local listings).

Targeted to K6-9, the new season of The Electric Company, which airs five days a week, will begin with a special three-episode recurring role by Kyle Massey (Cory in the House), playing Keith's cousin PJ.

Following the debut week, new episodes will bow each Friday. The new season will also feature celebrity appearances by NBA player Dwight Howard (Orlando Magic/center), John Leguizamo, LL Cool J, and Sherrie Shephard among others.

Season two of The Electric Company is made possible by the support of American Greetings and Beaches Resorts. The series is part of PBS Kids Raising Readers national literacy initiative, which focuses on using public media to improve reading skills of K2-8, particularly for kids from low-income families.

Smart Kids Group debuts Live at the Hive, a new social networking community targeted to kids/tweens and their parents.
The bee hive-themed community features Bert the Bee and other characters that lead users through Live at the Hive, which includes a range of areas or in this case neighborhood hives like The Healthy Hive, The Travel Hive, and The Safety Hive among others.
Safety is a key component of this social network. So, it will include various features such as monthly reports to parents that show where their kids have visited and who they have been interacting with on the site.

The NPD Group leisure time activities research

Despite the excitement generated from new platforms, America is still mostly a nation of couch potatoes who spend a vast majority of their leisure time in front of the boob tube, according to the latest update to the "Entertainment Trends in America" consumer tracking surveys conducted by The NPD Group. Some 81% of respondents reporting watching an average of 10 hours of TV per week (not including movies.)

Other finding included:
Despite the proliferation of iPods and other MP3 players, 78% of Americans still spend 5+ hours/week listening to traditional AM/FM radio

with 60% still listening to music on a CD

70% of Americans spend 4 hours/week on average on IM and email

Some 47% visited social networking sites, spending an average of 5 hours/week

11% of respondents reported tweeting an average of 3 hours/week

Top 5 Leisure Time Activities in the U.S.
(based on % of consumers who took part in prior week)
Watch TV show/sports/news (excluding movies): 81%
Listen to music on traditional AM/FM radio (not satellite): 78%
Instant-messaging or e-mailing: 70%
Listen to music on a CD: 60%
Watch a movie on TV (excluding PPV and VOD): 58%


Source: The NPD Group

Kenn Viselman presents

Producer/marketer Kenn Viselman, he brought Teletubbies and Thomas the Tank Engine to the US, forms a new film and TV production company Kenn Viselman presents ... The company recently completed filming its first feature film The Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure.

Targeted to kids, the interactive movie features Cloris Leachman, Chazz Palminteri, Jamie Pressly, Toni Braxton, Cary Elwes and Christopher Lloyd. Directed by Matthew Diamond, Viselman plans to release The Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure in November 2010 on 3000+ movie screens.

The company's development slate includes eleven movie projects including Sleeping Rudy, Step Off and a follow-up of The Oogieloves, which heads into pre-production this January. Kenn Viselman presents

... appointments include Angela Rivet as SVP/Production; Eileen Potrock as SVP/Marketing and Third Party Strategic Alliances; Julie Polkes as VP/Public Relations; Kara Moline as Director/Ancillary Rights; and Mitchell Rivet as Manager/Investor Relations.

Our Little Genius, Sprout

Actor Kevin Pollak will host Fox's new kid-centric game show Our Little Genius. The series, which challenges kids that are expects in select areas, will makes its debut on Wednesday, January 13 as the lead-out to American Idol and then find its permanent home the following Tuesday, January 19 at 9p.

Mark Burnett Productions and Zoo Productions are the producers behind the Our Little Genius game series. Pollak is best known for his roles in the movies A Few Good Man, The Usual Suspects and Casino, with upcoming movies including playing opposite Bruce Willis in Kevin Smith's A Couple of DICS and Middle Men with Luke Wilson and Giovanni Ribisi.

Given the time slots, the series is more likely for adults which is good because most average kids don't likely want to watch genius kids on a regular basis.

Hit Entertainment teams with Sprout, the 24/7 preschool TV, on demand and online destination, to launch Let's Grow, a DVD series that will focus on life skills and lessons for preschoolers.

The new line will feature themed DVDs comprised of episodes of Hit Entertainment series, such as Barney, Bob the Builder, Thomas & Friends, among others, and tied together by live-action interstitial segments starring hosts from Sprout's Sunny Side Up Show.

Lionsgate Home Entertainment, a longtime distributor of Hit's home entertainment, will release the first DVD title, Lend a Helping Hand on January 12, 2010, followed by a second title in 2Q 2010. Additionally, each DVD will come with a parent resource guide including information and suggestions that correspond with the theme of that DVD.

Sesame Street is headed for Nigeria!

Sesame Street is headed for Nigeria! Sesame Workshop is developing a new series targeted to Nigerian kids, which will offer messaging about staying in school, girl empowerment and HIV/Aids.

Sesame Street Nigeria (working title) is being produced through a 5-year grant from the American people via the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and will initially include 78x30 (making up three seasons) as well as outreach materials.

Sesame Workshop is working closely with an advisory board of local exporters in order to determine the focus and content for the new series. The series will feature Kami and Big Bird among other characters. The first three seasons will address these goals through the following themes:

Season 1: We Can - will focus on empowering kids to aspire to be anything they want and encourage them to stay in school. Show content will portray community participation in the learning process and suggesting there is also time for play, fun and creativity in kids' lives.

Season 2: We Do It Right will highlight honesty and integrity, courtesy and coping with mistakes. Themes will include mutual respect and understanding and gender parity.

Season 3: We Live Here will focus on community activities that reflect the importance of culture and caring for the environment.

Chello Multicanal and Zon Multimedia

Chello Multicanal and Zon Multimedia ink a partnership for the production, marketing and distribution of kid's movie and entertainment channels across Portugal and Portuguese-speaking Africa.

The partnership sees the creation of a new company to handle these projects, Dreamia Servicos de Televisao, of which Chello and Zon are equal partners. The three companies will launch a Panda Biggs, a tween-targeted channel.

Dreamia will broadcast four channels, with the other three being the kid-aimed Panda, a movie channel titled Hollywood, and MOV, which will offer movies and TV series. Chello will distribute the Dreamia channels in Portugal, while Zon will do so in Portuguese-speaking Africa.