CitizenTube has been around for a while as YouTube’s news and political blog, but it’s now being refocused ans tested as a video news feed. Could this eventually lead to a YouTube breaking news channel via connected TV platforms such as Google TV?
CitizenTube
CitizenTube has been a part of YouTube for a few years now. It started as a video channel on the main site before spawning its own separate domain.
Originally conceived as a way of keeping track of the way people are using video to change the world, CitizenTube morphed into a video blog covering news and politics. And now comes its latest iteration – as a breaking news video feed.
YouTube News Feed
YouTube is increasingly becoming the place to go on the Web for footage of breaking news stories. Read about a story on a dedicated news site and the chances are someone will have uploaded a video about it on YouTube.
This has led, I guess inevitably, to YouTube realizing the potential it has at its fingertips. According to the YouTube Blog, the site is testing the YouTube News Feed over the next few months, an effort in association with Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
This, essentially, turns CitizenTube into a news feed, with videos regularly uploaded which tell the story of a particular event happening somewhere in the world at that moment in time.
As well as being curated by editors, YouTube is seeking submissions to the Twitter feed @citizentube. If you’ve uploaded a breaking news video, they want to hear about it.
Breaking News Channel
This appeals to me immediately, as it provides a left-field news source with video footage to add context to stories. But this could end up being bigger than what it currently is.
Could Google actually be attempting to create a dedicated news channel in preparation for the connected TV platforms such as Google TV, which are, after all, going to bring YouTube well and truly into the living room?
Conclusions
is the one online video site that you wouldn’t bet against being able to compete with television in the future. And with the might of Google bringing the site to the televisions and set-top boxes in the near future, a YouTube news channel isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
