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The people behind the Tribeca Film Festival are getting a channel, but unlike the channel from the people behind the Sundance Film Festival, don't look for it on television.
Tribeca Enterprises, the parent of the Tribeca Film Festival, is teaming up with Maker Studios to create a channel on YouTube.com, named the Picture Show, that is to go live later this year.
The channel on YouTube, which is part of Google, will be a home for online series and short films, rather than the feature-length movies that are released by Tribeca Film in theaters and on the video-on-demand channels on cable systems.
"We believe bringing content to audiences across multiple platforms is the right strategy," said Jon Patricof,president and chief operating officer at Tribeca Enterprises. As a result, "digital platforms like YouTubeare highly important," he said.
The Picture Show was among several channels that were announced by executives of YouTube and Google at a presentation in New York on Wednesday; others include Team USA, a channel for the US Olympic Committee, and Wigs, a channel aimed at women.
The intent is for YouTube to offer more than 100 online channels of original programming; shows on some of the initial channels are being sponsored by advertisers like AT&T, General Motors, Toyota and Unilever.
The YouTube presentation completed two weeks of events, hosted by digital media companies, that were intended to help attract money from marketers that might otherwise be spent on the most popular advertising medium of them all, television.
"Because television is the largest piece of the pie, it's the one everybody's going to nibble at," said Zain Raj, chief executive at Hyper Marketing in Chicago, which owns agencies in fields like digital, direct and shopper marketing.
Television ad spending in the United States last year totaled $71.8 billion, Nielsen reported this week, up 5 per cent from 2010 and perhaps the first time the figure has topped $70 billion.
The digital media events were held under the portmanteau Digital Content NewFronts - as in a new version of the upfronts, the presentations that broadcast networks and cable channels make each spring to marketers ahead of the fall TV season. The impetus for the NewFronts was the increasing willingness of consumers to watch video online and on devices like smartphones and tablets.
