LAS VEGAS - YouTube is looking to increase viewership on its online video service by making the service available on an array of connected devices and by adding new content, according to a top executive for the Google Inc unit.
The next challenge for the popular service, which already has 800 million viewers a month, is to make YouTube a more central part of these viewers’ lives, said Robert Kyncl, YouTube vice president in charge of content partnerships.
“What we want is for viewers is to spend more time on YouTube,” Kyncl told Reuters in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Kyncl, who moved from online rival Netflix a year and a half ago, comes to the consumer electronics showcase each year to check out connected devices because the more gadgets available with Internet access, the more ways consumers can watch YouTube.
“We’re a huge benefactor of what consumer electronics companies are doing with their devices, which is building Internet connectivity into them,” he said. “It’s allowing us to get in front of more consumers.”
According to Kyncl, who is due to deliver a keynote speech at the show on Thursday, YouTube already works on about 350 million devices, including tablets, phones and televisions.
On mobile phones alone, consumers look at half a billion YouTube videos every day, a viewership rate that doubled in the space of about a year. As a result Kyncl declined to predict the growth rate for 2012 except to say that it would be rapid.
“We were wrong in our projections in this past year. We were too conservative,” he said. “It’s not just YouTube. Its Hulu or Netflix too. Whether its mobile tablets or TV. It will continue.”
Unlike Netflix, YouTube currently depends on advertising for its revenue. The company does offer an online movie rental service on a smaller scale. Kyncl was coy about whether YouTube would ever expand into paid video services.