YouTube founder says the future is about ‘stickability’ and convergence

Chad Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube predicts that the next five years for the site will be all about “stickability” and convergence of channels.

In order to encourage people to stay on the site for hours rather than minutes, he says, “we need to create a much more seamless experience across devices.”

Interviewed in The Telegraph, Hurley says “People think about the world of TV and the world of online video as being different ways to distribute video, but what happens when every TV is connected to wi-fi with a browser? What does that mean for your distribution opportunities? And these budgets dedicated to digital online – that proportion spent on video versus the big dollars that are being spent against TV – what happens when those worlds collide and is it just one thing? That is what we envision.”

Expressing confidence that YouTube is on course to become a truly profitable machine, attracting advertisers in their droves, as well as its billion views a day, Hurley asks whether the iPad is a phone or a computer or a TV. It’s a rhetorical question, serving to underline his thoughts about the future of media channels, in which YouTube’s future success is all tied up: “People continue to try to throw things in the buckets when really these are all going to be different-sized devices with a connection to the internet.”

Adds Salar Kalamangar, vice president of product management, and one of the people behind Google’s highly successful AdWords model: “When you think about the TV ads market and how large that is, and in the future that content is going to be delivered via IP…we think we are in a great position to lead the way.”