AI Role In 2 Lakh Channels, Big Addition To GDP: YouTube India Head To NDTV

Artificial Intelligence is empowering content creators with small budgets and in this sense, it is making content creation democratic, Gunjan Soni, the Managing Director of YouTube India, told NDTV as the creative ecosystem of YouTube contributed Rs 18,000 crore to the Indian GDP in the last one year.

In an exclusive interview with NDTV's Shiv Aroor, Soni said there were around 2,00,000 new channels that were monetised for the very first time last year. And much of this was possible only because of AI. 

"Content creation is expensive -- especially high quality creation... AI can support somebody's creative vision," and take out what she called the "grunt work". 

hat have been big money spinners in a country like India are "low hanging fruits" like dubbing, she said.  "They are using AI to bring out mythology or traditional historic concepts which again become very prohibitive especially for smaller production houses to do the quality that viewers are getting used to today," she added. This, she said, is interesting because it would allow India to "bring out and tell its stories".

AI, she said, takes away the primary barrier "especially for our regional creators," so content from south India can shine in the north and vice versa. 

It can even help this content "go global" and "I think we are still just starting to scratch the surface of that opportunity," she added.

All of this, she said, is also boosting the viewership of YouTube, slowly pushing it  towards becoming the "future of television". 

"When you combine the power of democratised access with that large screen viewing experience you have one of the most compelling propositions and we see that nearly 75 million adults in India are already watching YouTube on the large screen. I think that is the reason you are also seeing a lot of high quality content now partnering with YouTube as well and I think this is only going to grow because every year in India we expect another five to seven million screens to become smart screens and that's a massive shift in the landscape," she added.