It's designed to help organisations - including broadcasters - solicit and select video material.
YouTube handles the hosting of the videos and offers an interface to manage them on a website: "news organizations can ask for citizen reporting; nonprofits can call-out for support videos around social campaigns; businesses can ask users to submit promotional videos about your brand," YouTube explains.
It is, in effect, another erosion of what once made broadcasters different from non-professionals - adding to the list of things anyone can do for minimal cost that were once the exclusive realm of large organisations, and, at the same time, offering a service to news professionals from an internet company their children are the experts on.
YouTube's own video explains how it is moving its tanks onto news organisations' front lawns, suggesting how they can "create [their] own bureau of citizen stringers":
Here's how it works.
People upload videos to YouTube direct from an organisation's website. Anyone doing so must first register for their own YouTube account and the video will appear on YouTube - with a link to the organisation's website.
The heart of the idea is something called the "Google App Engine moderation panel interface" - an editable list of the videos that have been submitted. It lets an editor select the wheat from the chaff.
To be able to do that, you need to register for an App Engine account, which gets you involved in some fairly complicated downloading and setting up. Once you've done that, you're all set to act as the editor of your own video news service.
Useful new facility, or just a way for YouTube (and therefore its owner, Google) to make sure uploaded videos end up within their orbit? Because, of course, anyone soliciting content for their organisation's website using YouTube Direct is generating material and potential profits for YouTube/Google.
If you find yourself asking not what you can do for YouTube, but what YouTube can do for you, there is another, less well-publicised option: you can register with YouTube and upload videos to your account, marking them Private. That means they can't be viewed on YouTube, but you can still embed them on your website. Or would that be exploiting YouTube?
