YouTube South Africa launched

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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YouTube has recently exceeded 2 billion video views per day, with 450 million users worldwide.  With 24 hours of YouTube content uploaded every minute, it is hardly surprising that it is one of the biggest bandwidth consumers on the Internet today.

Alon Chen, Marketing Manager at YouTube, today announced the launch of the South African version of YouTube.  This, Chen says, will make it easier for local users to find local content and share their content with other South Africans.

YouTube.co.za is the first local YouTube domain in Africa, something which Google hopes will enable local Internet users to better communicate with the international community.

“YouTube South Africa makes it even faster and easier for local users to find and view the videos most relevant to them, by tuning search and discovery algorithms such as featured videos and homepage and category spotlights,” Google said in a press statement.

Content uploaded by users in South Africa will show up as ‘browse pages’ on the YouTube South Africa site, creating a new space for the national community and giving South African users the opportunity to increase their exposure.

In advance of this launch YouTube signed partnership agreements with a number of South African media companies including the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and e.tv.  These broadcasters, like other YouTube partners, have established a presence on the site to easily distribute their content and grow their audience.  

Over the years the public broadcaster SABC has built up an extensive archive of TV shows. Its current broadcasting schedule also contains gems that are well suited for this new platform. The SABC will be piloting a variety of older and current content on the channel. If the pilot proves successful the content offering may be extended to include a variety of its news, sport, soaps, dramas and comedies.

The future

Chen further announced that YouTube users can expect various innovations from the company in future, including:

–Full length TV shows
–Pay per View services
–High Definition videos (1080p)
–3D content
–YouTube Feather Beta (youtibe.com/testtube)
–Auto Captioning
–Auto translations
–More Social interaction

“One of YouTube’s key priorities, in addition to the making the platform a comprehensive destination, is ensuring that videos load and play quickly — even in places where bandwidth is at a premium. In addition to the standard YouTube experience, users have the option to watch videos with YouTube Feather,” said Chen.

This beta offering is a stripped-down version of the page on which any video plays; it only includes the site’s most basic features to help ensure that those with low-speed Internet connections are able to play videos play faster.

YouTube Feather can be found in TestTube (http://www.youtube.com/testtube), the area on the site where new products are tested.

Local YouTube presence

The YouTube.co.za URL currently redirects to http://www.youtube.com/?gl=ZA&hl=en-GB hosted internationally (IP 209.85.227.100).

It is however common knowledge that Google has a growing network presence in South Africa, as it does in many other countries around the world, to try and ensure the best possible performance of Google services for users in local regions.

It is an open secret that, for some time already, Google has set up Google Global Cache (GGC) servers in South Africa.  According to one source Google currently has three sets of GGC servers in South Africa, which includes servers on the Internet Solutions and SAIX/Telkom networks.

Many locally requested YouTube videos are currently served from these GGC servers, something which has been the case for educational institutions on the TENET network from early 2009.

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