Google announced today that it will be opening up a YouTube creative studio space in New York City in October 2014. When completed, the space will become the fourth building that creators can use to produce more professional videos.
YouTube’s new space will be located in the Chelsea Marketplace district and will span about 20,000 to 25,000 square feet. Naturally since it’s in NYC, the space is going to be much smaller than its other US facility in Los Angeles, which is 41,000 square feet and in a hangar formerly owned by Howard Hughes’ airplane company.
For those that aren’t familiar, YouTube’s creative studio is a place where anyone enrolled in its Partner Program can go and hone their skills and gain access to resources needed to help enhance their video’s production value.
The New York facility will have workshops and events just like in Los Angeles and will most likely have sound stages where creators can experiment with sets, props, green screens, and more.
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Expanding to New York City certainly seems to be a no-brainer. After all, it is the place filled with advertising agencies, fashion, and media — which have a demand for video and have people eager to tap more into the power of the video social network.
Speaking at the 2013 VidCon conference, YouTube’s Vice President and Global Head of Content Operations Tom Pickett and Chief Marketing Officer Danielle Tiedt, revealed that the video service now has 325 channels with more than 1 million subscribers. Its mobile apps have now been downloaded over 250 million times — currently 40 percent of all hours viewed on YouTube in the US come through mobile devices.
These figures appear to highlight the belief that YouTube needs to evolve their product to the next step and this includes improving video quality starting at the source: the creators.
After all, YouTube needs to work with creators if it wants videos to be uploaded and it has been taking steps to make offer the necessary support. This includes the Creator Academy, which was launched in May. The company says that 40,000 people have enrolled to learn how to use YouTube.
When we toured YouTube’s Los Angeles’ studio, we spoke with company production strategist Rob Polonsky, who hinted that the creative studios would be expanding in the future. Now it’s clear that it has New York in its sights.
See related: Inside YouTube’s massive LA studio where it hopes to foster content that will rival television and cable
Photo credit: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images
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