Five years into the life of Google's popular online video service YouTube, the company has created a South African version, with a local Web address.
“We're very excited to bring a local version of YouTube to SA and we look forward to continuing to improve the YouTube experience for our South African users,” says Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder.
The announcement has not been entirely unexpected, since last month, the company's search pages started resolving to a local IP address. Google announced today that it will also start hosting some content locally; however, the company is not spilling any details on a local server farm.
"YouTube is localised all over the world in 23 different countries and our aim is to have a fast playback experience with as little buffering as possible. We do not, however, disclose the location of our servers. If users are experiencing slow playbacks, they can always try out YouTube Feather, which reduces the watch page to the bare essentials to focus on faster playbacks," says Julie Taylor, Google's communications and public affairs manager for SA.
Youtube Feather is a stripped version of the service released alongside the full South African service.
Google says just before the unveiling of the locally-hosted YouTube page, it signed content deals with both SABC and etv, which will see a pilot of the broadcasters content distributed via the online service.
“These broadcasters, like other YouTube partners, have established a presence on the site to easily distribute their content and grow their audience. 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,” Google explained in a statement.
Local YouTube user uploads will also be locally hosted, and Google says these uploads will show up as “browse pages” on South African version of the site. “This will create a new space for the national community and give South African users the opportunity to increase their exposure.”
The company says the local version of its online video service will make it quicker to load and watch videos. However, more important for many South African Internet users still using capped services is that the videos from the .co.za site will use local bandwidth and not international bandwidth.
Related story:
Google mistakenly got wireless data
Share