Welcome to the future of video. Please stay a while.

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

It’s a Saturday and you want to watch your favorite YouTube star’s show, a big Hollywood movie, a clip of your friend’s weekend in Austin, a newly-released music video, a global sporting event, a live concert and breaking news from Japan. Six years ago, when YouTube first arrived, you’d have to go from TV to laptop, desk to couch, or platform to platform, to do all this. Six years ago, there were two types of video: video you watched on your TV, and video you watched on your laptop. Today there’s increasingly just video, and it’s available everywhere: on a phone, a tablet, a laptop or a television screen, in your office, on your couch, in a cab.

YouTube isn’t about one type of device or one type of video. Content from traditional media partners, made-for-web and personal videos all co-exist on the site. Like surfing? You can watch pros shoot barrels, rent your favorite surf movie and check out your friend’s upload of his morning session at your favorite local spot. News junkie? YouTube has breaking news uploads from citizen journalists alongside anchored reports and live streams from news partners.

You’re finding more and more of the content you love on YouTube, which is now available on 350 million devices. We know this because you’re watching videos to the tune of 2 billion views a day. But you’re spending just 15 minutes a day on YouTube, and spending five hours a day watching TV. As the lines between online and offline continue to blur, we think that’s going to change.

Today, we’re adding around 3,000 new movie titles for rent available to users in the U.S. (more on this in a post later today) that will be accompanied by reviews and behind-the-scenes movie extras. Whether it’s short movie trailers, funny movie parodies or full-length blockbuster films, we encourage you to sit back and settle in to the YouTube movies experience.

In addition to expanding our movie offerings, we’re also bolstering our investment in the content that’s already being viewed by hundred of millions of people on YouTube. Our 20,000+ partners—folks like Machinima, Annoying Orange and Ryan Higa—are producing original content for the web and commanding TV-size audiences for their own brand of programming. Through YouTube Next, we’re helping fuel the creation of this type of content with initiatives like the YouTube Creator Institute and YouTube NextUp, following past initiatives like Partner Grants (which brought us Key of Awesome, creators of one of 2010’s most-watched videos) and $1,000 B&H Photo credits. In the coming year, we’ll bring even more content to YouTube. Building on the success of Partner Grants and YouTube NextUp, we’ll help catalyze the creation of content by devoting even more resources to creators who you’ll know from TV or Hollywood, and to existing YouTube partners who have already built loyal audiences on the site. Look out for more details on this in the coming months.

While six years ago you had to move device, room and platform to get all the video that matters most to you, today you can find it all on YouTube. By expanding our content partnerships worldwide and stimulating the success of budding filmmakers, artists and entrepreneurs, we’ll ensure that YouTube remains the best place for the world to see and discover rich talent. So stay tuned—there’s much more to come.

Posted by Salar Kamangar, Head of YouTube