YouTube in process of launching new education, healthcare products

Online audio-visual content platform YouTube has announced new features to fetch more healthcare-based and educational content from creators. 

It plans on launching an AI-enabled solution, Aloud, that will allow a small group of healthcare providers to simplify the process of dubbing and creating content that supports uploading a single video with multiple audio tracks to enable the creation of local language health content.

Additionally, it also plans on launching YouTube Courses, an education-focused product, to create a new way to monetize for creators in the education space on YouTube. This would begin rolling out in beta in 2023. 

The online video platform announced the findings of the latest Oxford Economic Study on the creator economy and parallelly the launch of its education and healthcare healthcare-based products for its creators. 

As per the report, YouTube’s creative ecosystem contributed over Rs 10,000 crore to the Indian GDP and supported more than 750,000 full-time equivalent jobs in India in 2021.

“We surveyed around 5,000 Indian creators, 500 Indian businesses, and 4,000 Indian users to understand the contribution of the creative ecosystem to the economy,” said James Lambert, director of economic consulting - Asia, Oxford Economics Study.  

Through this, qualified creators in India can begin offering free or paid courses. The launch of courses would imply direct competition with existing edtech unicorns like Byjus, Unacademy, and Vedantu. 

YouTube aims to create an improved, comprehensive and structured learning experience through the new product. 

Creators like LearnoHub, Speak English With Aishwarya, and Telusko among others have been roped in to develop courses across academic and vocational subjects in various Indian languages in the beta phase. 

YouTube has also been actively undertaking investments, wherein it acquired the video commerce app simsim for an undisclosed sum in June 2021. It had also invested in the India Digitization Fund in which its parent entity Google announced its plan to invest $10 billion in India.