YouTube launches its pop-up space in Hyderabad, eyes India's expansion

Google's subsidiary and world's largest online video community platform YouTube has launched its first pop-up space in India at Hyderabad.

The three-day event from October 5 to 7 in Ramoji Film City will be focusing on integrating industry professionals and amateur YouTube creators, using local language to create more engaging and richer content with a special emphasis on increasing the subscribing base.

Shortlisting 700 applicants the event having four workshops will cover 400 creators and 18 productions. Special classes on video production and building online business will be held. The training session would help the participants improve digital marketing skills, experts said.

The program which aims a to get footfall of over 800 content creators at Ramoji Film City in the next two days, is aimed at offering everything from training to hands-on workshops to networking with other members of the YouTube community. The event will provide creators an opportunity to produce content with access to professional high-end sets and departments.

In this event, videos are being recorded using latest competent cameras. Sound and sync tests are also done in the process. Since some of the creators at the workshop were already the ones with successful YouTube channels, the workshop intends to be a training ground for young YouTube users and creators who were still to pick up subscription figures.

Since YouTube has been encouraging original content in regional languages, most of the videos to be produced during the pop-up would not be in English.

Speaking at the event, Lance Podell, global head of YouTube Spaces, said, “India has a dynamic content creator ecosystem and Hyderabad is one of the creative talent hubs. Success of local language creators like Teluguone, Viva, Chai Bisket, Mahathalli, Kantri guyz, Kiraak hyderabadiz and Khelpedia are great examples of how young creators are redefining entertainment for their audiences on YouTube" said Podell.

Podell also noted that different creators face different challenges and they have tried addressing almost all of them through its studio spaces. This may include training on effectively using lighting in videos, helping in script writing or working in a larger setup in collaboration with other creators.

"We have been very focused on the Hindi audience and Hindi creators over the last couple of years with Mumbai as the hub. This is the first opportunity where we are experimenting what creating content is like for YouTube creators in another language and culture in India" said David MacDonald, Head of YouTube Spaces for Asia-Pacific. We are going to learn from the feedback they receive from this pop-up space, understand the needs of the local creator community and experiment with the format in future rollouts in the country added MacDonald.

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YouTube has planned 45 such pop-up spaces worldwide throughout this year and has nine permanent spaces globally. YouTube had setup its first permanent creator studio in Mumbai in December 2015. Since then, over 7500 creators have visited the Mumbai studio and produced over 500 videos with free of cost access, Podell said. He added that over 50 independent creators in India have hit the 1 million subscriber mark and over 500 creators have crossed the 100k subscriber mark in the past 10-12 months.

In the Mumbai studio, the company's workshops have been one of its most popular offerings among video creators, said YouTube Space India head Jigisha Mistry.

While the Hyderabad space is the first in the country, YouTube has held similar pop-up spaces in cities like Jakarta, Seoul, Bangkok, Manila, Miami and Mexico City among others.

The online video community in India has been in existence for the last nine years and counts the country among the top 10 markets for video consumption and creation.

According to YouTube, 85 percent of the content is watched through mobile and this has grown 400 percent in the last one year.