YouTube Malaysia makes its debut

YOUTUBE, the world’s largest online video sharing community, in which an amazing four billion videos are viewed a day, announced the launch of a localised service for Malaysia last week.

Malaysian YouTube fans can now access the localised site at www.youtube.com.my. The brand new YouTube Malaysia offers a local interface to easily and quickly find videos most relevant to Malaysians including expanded content from local and global partners.

The site creates a new online space for Malaysians which allows for local advertisements to be placed on the interface. This in turn gives the creators a chance to increase their exposure.

“Over the last few years Malaysians have been watching YouTube in huge numbers, and by launching a version of the site optimised for Malaysia today, we aim to create an even more relevant local You-Tube experience. More importantly, Malaysian personalities and musicians have been creating extremely memorable videos, some of which are known the world over,” said Adam Smith, director of product management for YouTube in the Asia-Pacific region.

YouTube also has signed a licensing agreement that will allow Malaysian musicians and composers represented by the collecting society Music Author’s Copyright Protection (MACP) to earn revenue on YouTube. Revenue is generated when advertisements are displayed against You-Tube partner’s videos. Under this agreement, Malaysian authors will now receive payments from their associations when rights holders distribute them.

“YouTube is extremely popular in Malaysia and we are pleased with their decision to monetise the traffic which will benefit songwriters and music publishers when their music is used on YouTube,” said Chan Miew Lan, general manager of MACP.

For the launch week, You Tube has already secured masthead advertisement on the YouTube Malaysia homepage from Dutch Lady, Malaysia Airlines, Maxis and Standard Chartered.

The Washington Post also reported on YouTube’s new editing tool which, after adding a few basic editing tools to its arsenal in the fall, YouTube is kicking it up a notch with more automated tools aimed at improving the quality of online video.

The company said it will add a feature that will automatically offer to fix shaky or dark video.

“Sometimes videos suffer from symptoms like ‘shakycamera-itis’ or ‘augmenteddarkness-levels’ that keep viewers from seeing just how awesome your video really is,” YouTube wrote in a company blog post. “Now, we’re adding a feature that does the work of curing these symptoms for you.”

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has made a big push in the past year to improve content on its site.

The site is not only trying to up the production quality of the user-submitted videos that made it huge, it’s also investing in its own original content.

YouTube has made a US$100 million (about RM300 million) investment in production, betting on the prediction that head of global partnerships Robert Kyncl made in January: that in the next decade, 75 per cent of all channels will be born on the Internet.