(Friday, December 16, 2011) - YouTube believes we are poised at another transitional moment in the history of broadcast. Its service, as the company sees it, will provide a nearly limitless number of personalities to speak to any audience, to reach every niche. Cable television took us from a few channels to a few hundred, but the selection offered by YouTube will be in the hundreds of thousands or millions.

YouTube’s challenge now is to convert its audience of casual users—27 million unique visitors every day—into real, devoted fans. When I visit YouTube headquarters, the executives there are excited about a three-person-wide slide that’s being built from the third floor down to the second and about gnomes that have been surreptitiously placed in clusters throughout the building, each accompanied by a printed-out pun (“Oh gnome you didn’t!”). They are also eager to present their vision of a future in which YouTube is viewed on all devices, all the time.....

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